Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (50 page)

They might be nice kids, Tod and Bryan, but they were not Craft’s idea of deckhands. He wanted men who spoke the same language as he and who knew a scupper from a fair lead. But Craft had not put the team together, Tommy had, and Tommy had requirements other than at-sea experience: First, he had to be able to trust everyone involved with the tech team—no strangers. Next, he liked the men strong minded but not hotheaded; no ship was big enough. Although he might not consult with Tod and Bryan on technical decisions, Tommy wanted even the deckhands not afraid to think and not afraid to defend their thoughts. Mostly, he wanted them ready to get tired and dirty and stay tired and dirty for a long time.

So Craft’s deck crew was Bryan Anderson, a blue-water sailboat sailor who first would have to unlearn everything he knew about sailing, because for reasons Craft could not explain, sailboat sailors spoke a nautical language entirely different from that spoken by the navy and the Merchant Marine; John Doering, a forty-nine-year-old treasure hunter whose idea of being at sea, Craft surmised, was leaving the dock in the morning with a peanut butter sandwich and returning before dark; and Tod Steele, who presently was barfing pork roast and anchovies over the side of the
Seaward Explorer
.

With Bryan, Craft had to wring out the sailor and let the seaman soak in. But Bryan understood tools and engines, and he learned quickly. Craft watched Bryan closely, and because Bryan was anxious to learn, he made few mistakes.

Doering was not a kid eager to please. He was a laid-back treasure hunter and liked everybody and saw no reason to make life any more complicated than it already was. He would jump on the crane, fire it up, swing it around, and pick something up. “You try that with a five-thousand-pound
object,” said Craft, “while you’ve got a three- or four-degree roll to the ship and maybe a little pitch, it doesn’t work.” Craft wanted him to put three slings on it and a tag line before it came off the deck. Doering would say, “Why do I wanna do that?” That was not the answer Craft was looking for. When Craft said, “Do it this way,” he wanted to hear, “Okay. Is this the way you want it done all the time?”

Tod was by far the youngest man on the ship. After Craft had barked in his green face about making sure that Old Dad did not sweat, he asked Tod, “Do you know anything about lines?” Tod said, “No,” and Craft motioned for him to take a seat, and for the next two hours he explained to Tod the evolution of rope and portage. He showed Tod a half dozen kinds of lines and told him the attributes of each and how they were to be used. “He was incredible,” said Tod, “and it never ended. Every day he’d explain different things to me.” Craft taught Tod how to tie a dozen good knots and then how to splice, until Tod was one of three men on board who could braid an eye at the end of a nylon line. Within two weeks, Tod could hang upside down from the towpoint off the fantail out over the water and tie a bowline with one hand.

When Craft ran his new deck crew through their first complete launch, it took them fifteen minutes to get the vehicle from the deck into the water unhooked. One week later, they had it down to two minutes.

L
ATER IN THE
afternoon Tod and Bryan arrived, Tommy wanted Craft to launch the vehicle again, so they could get a camera down on Sidewheel. But problems with the crane kept the vehicle on deck until late that evening, and by then the weather had begun to fall apart. Craft was against launching, but Tommy saw it as an opportunity to learn more about deploying in marginal conditions. “That is gross stupidity,” said Craft, “and I’ve told Harvey that many times to his face. If the weather is lousy, don’t launch the vehicle! Keep the damn thing on deck!”

In forty years at sea, Craft had never had a sailor seriously injured. He respected the weather; when it started to break down, he had to know when to stop and when not to launch in the first place, or he would pay a price, maybe a steep one. “Harvey’s version,” said Craft, “is that any smart man can go out and do this stuff. Harvey’s full of shit when it comes to that, and I’ve told Harvey that.”

Craft figured that when the wind whistled up to twenty-five knots and the waves rose better than eight feet, a state-five sea, it was time to stay indoors and mend your equipment. Tommy figured it was time to explore the situation, to see how the vehicle moved through the bounce and roll of the air-sea interface, so he could add this to his store of information. “There probably were times where I would push Don and say, ‘Don, yeah, there’s seas here, but look what they’re doing, this is maybe different.’ Don’s not really a research guy, whereas I viewed a lot of what we were doing as an R&D effort. Maybe somebody else would think it was really risky, but I am constantly trying to push the limits to figure out more about what can be done. It’s part of my personality.”

After heated words with Tommy on the back deck, Craft launched the vehicle a little after eight o’clock that evening, but it was on the bottom for only two hours when Tommy agreed they had to pull up. The seas and wind had continued to build, the weather fax confirmed more was on the way, and they needed two hours to get the vehicle back on deck. They recovered in seas approaching ten feet and the wind peaking at thirty knots.

For the next three days, the wind topped twenty knots and the seas ran to six feet with a confused swell, and for those three days the techs worked on the vehicle. With the ship heaving, they had to cover tools in plastic garbage bags and tie parts down with bungee cord and duct-tape coffee cans to the frame of the vehicle to hold the bolts. Waves sometimes washed over the low freeboard and curled around their ankles. Despite the weather those three days, they expanded the vehicle’s capacity enough to operate the Mesotech and the video camera at once. Now they could find the wreck on the Mesotech again, then work their way closer until they could see it on camera.

By midmorning on June 17, the sea had dropped to gentle swells and the wind to light breezes, and Craft orchestrated a safe launch of the vehicle. As the cable reeled off the winch for a two-hour descent, they heard the drone of a single-engine plane. Their pilot had arrived with the first airdrop of the season, and everyone came out on deck to watch him circle.

The pilot had flown out from Wilmington, the “beach,” and as silly as it sounded, there was something special about that. They would see
him only through the windshield a hundred yards out, but in this lonesome patch of water on the far side of the Gulf Stream, he was their physical link to the outside world. The techs called it “touching home.”

The pilot’s name was Steve Gross, and he was the vital artery between shore support and the ship. A supply boat often took twenty hours to get out to the site; Gross could make it in two. With each day at sea costing Tommy twenty-five thousand dollars, every hour made a difference.

Gross was sixty-five and had been flying for forty-six years. In World War II, he had trained navy pilots. After the war he earned degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering at the University of Washington and worked at Boeing on electronics, radar design, and systems analysis. He was a fly-by-the-seat-of-his-britches barnstormer pilot, the kind you could picture flying in a little single-engine plane and suddenly throwing back the canopy and crawling out in the breeze toward the tail with a screwdriver clenched in his teeth because the dadburned rudder felt a tad too lively.

Tommy had bought Gross a forty-two-year-old Republic RC-3 Sea Bee, a single-engine seaplane shaped like a grasshopper, white and orange and black, with a big swale down its back and a wing across its head, and the pusher prop mounted backwards, above and behind the cockpit. The Sea Bee still had its original engine, and no one who knew airplanes seemed anxious to switch places with Gross, flying it across two hundred miles of open sea. The chief mechanic at the Wilmington airfield wondered out loud how Gross could fit through the door of the hangar with balls as big as his. Gross figured that if a good aviation mechanic thought he had balls that big, maybe they were inversely proportional to the size of his judgment.

Gross had been settled in Wilmington about a week when Tommy called Hodgdon and told him they needed a small bag of electronics parts flown out to the ship. This presented a problem: Contrary to their name, seaplanes don’t land in the open sea, and the windows don’t roll down or slide back; yet somehow Gross had to get that bag out of the cockpit. He decided he would simply force the door open the best he could and drop the bag into the ocean and let them pick it up in the Zodiac. All he had to do was fly the Sea Bee low to the water without stalling, keep both hands on the wheel, and nudge that door open against an airstream
running eighty-five miles an hour, or about the same speed as the blow in a medium-size hurricane.

Bryan and Tod putt-putted out in the little Zodiac to wait for the drop, several white-tip sharks following them and circling. They watched the Sea Bee bank and level off at drop altitude, and just as it came even with the Zodiac, about twenty feet off the water, they saw the door crack open. Then a large package squeezed out the bottom of the crack, sucked straight up and back into the pusher prop, and exploded. Suddenly the air behind the plane filled with dozens of sparkling bubble-wrap packages of computer parts raining down toward the waves.

For another hour, Bryan and Tod looked for little packages of bubble wrap floating in the water; fortunately, the parts had been bound in sets, and they recovered most of the sets. Even with the mishap, Gross had saved Tommy one day’s operation, so in its first flight the Sea Bee had paid for itself.

W
HILE THE TECH
crew watched Gross circling, the new vehicle had reached the bottom and now waited for them to continue searching for the ship. But when Moore turned on the vehicle’s systems, the Mesotech sonar was not working. It had worked fine a hundred feet down during routine checks two hours earlier; now only the camera seemed to be operating. Trying to find something eight thousand feet below with a camera when you can see only twenty feet ahead in the dark is an act of faith. Tommy had experienced that the previous summer. Mike Williamson once compared the procedure to trying to snag small objects with dental floss from the top of the Empire State Building. But rather than spend hours to recover the vehicle, check it, and launch again, they decided to try searching with only the camera. From two o’clock that afternoon till ten o’clock that night, they made short runs back and forth with the camera, and the only thing they saw were tracks in the sediment where the camera sled from the previous year had careened off the bottom. When they recovered the vehicle at midnight, they tore apart the Mesotech. The weather was now optimum, light airs and smooth seas, and they had no time to waste.

For the next two days, with the Mesotech still not working, they ran nine more track lines with the camera, and they found nothing. They
knew the ship was just below them only a few meters away; any moment the sighting could come; but watching the white glare of the vehicle lights reflecting off the barren ocean floor quickly became tedious. Doering’s head sometimes hit the back of his chair in a dead sleep, but the rest of the techs left him alone until his snoring got so loud they couldn’t think. The only excitement they had was when Steve Gross returned to the ship, tried to land in the open sea, and blew the windshield out of the Sea Bee.

No pilot with half a brain and ten minutes in the air would consider landing a small seaplane two hundred miles at sea, but Tommy had told Gross that morale on the ship was low and they needed a mailbag brought out, and Gross said he would try. From the air the ocean looked like a great millpond. At fifty feet and again at ten feet, Gross thought, “It still looks good.” At five feet he saw the heavy roll, but it was too late. The ocean suddenly swelled beneath him and smacked the hull of the Sea Bee so hard it flexed the metal around the cockpit. “We thought for sure he’d bought the farm,” said Brockett.

Tommy helped Gross realign the windshield and snap the rubber seal back into the groove, then Gross taxied out quickly before the sea grew higher. From the ship, they could see his wake and then a series of white splashes. “Pretty quick,” said Gross, “it was only one tick and then the tail a little bit and finally I’m flying.” The crew cheered. Gross circled the ship, tipped his wings, and disappeared into a dot on the horizon headed west.

A week now had passed since they imaged the ship twice on close-in sonar the night before Hackman left. Of that week they had lost three days to bad weather and most of another four to equipment problems, and in the twenty-two hours they had searched with the camera they had got not even a glimpse of the ship.

Early the afternoon of June 21, the
Navigator
was dragging the sled at a quarter knot, only the camera sending back images from the ocean floor. At 1:15, Burlingham called down to the control van and announced that the
Seaward Explorer
had arrived again and was standing off. He and Craft had to transfer parts, supplies, chill boxes of produce, and fourteen thousand gallons of fuel. Scotty asked them not to tie on until the
Navigator
had hit the end of the track line and begun to turn.

Thirty minutes later, Burlingham called the control van again and said he now was preparing for the
Seaward Explorer
to come alongside. In the control van, the glare of white sediment on the monitors suddenly turned to shades of gray with distinct lines and contours, and then right in front of the techs, like an apparition, appeared the wreck.

Moore yelled to Scotty, “Tell the bridge to fend off and back down!” Then he slowed the vehicle.

Scotty called Burlingham. “We’ve got a contact here! Can you delay?”

But Burlingham had already left the bridge. The crew of the
Seaward Explorer
had thrown lines and were snugging her rubber tire fenders up against the
Navigator
.