In March 1952, the Cardena grounded on mud flats under Lions Gate Bridge and, in early 1953, struck a rock in Patrick Channel, near Sullivan Bay in the Broughton Archipelago.
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The ship took its name from Cardena Bay on the south shore of Kennedy Island, at the mouth of the Skeena River, which in turn was named after García López de Cárdenas, an early Spanish explorer of the New World.
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As if in anticipation of the indignities of her later groundings and collisions, the Cardena’s well-earned moment of glory came in the summer of 1927, when she freed the CNR liner SS Prince Rupert from the clutches of Ripple Rock in Seymour Narrows, a treacherous, three-mile tidal surge lying in Discovery Passage between Vancouver Island and Quadra Island.