Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (64 page)

Late that afternoon, Barry came down from the third floor, tired and wanting a break. Before he could open Bob’s door, Bob walked out.

“He looked terrible,” remembered Barry, “like he was sick.”

Bob had his head down. He saw Barry, but he said nothing; he half turned like he was going to walk back into his office. Then he stopped and stood still.

“What’s the matter?” asked Barry.

Bob took Barry into his office and closed the door. He turned on the screen, and there was the image of the new target. “I’ve been looking at this for the past four hours.” He measured it for Barry: It seemed
longer than the Galaxy site. He measured it again to be sure. He held a small aerial diagram of the
Central America
next to the image on the screen.

“It’s much bigger,” thought Barry. “You can see the outline, and you can see the sidewheels on either side.”

“Those are sidewheels, aren’t they?” he said to Bob.

Bob dropped into a careful refrain that he would use for months. “All I can say is this site fits the target model of the
Central America
as we now know it. This looks like a large shipwreck with coal on it, wooden hull, with engine works in the middle. That’s what it looks like.”

The next day, Bob arrived at the Victorian, went upstairs to his office on the second floor, and closed the door. “I was very nervous about this piece of information,” he said. Alone in the quiet of his office, he again brought up the image and measured every dimension, listing the figures; next to those he wrote the comparative figures for Galaxy. Then he experimented with his new software until he could bring Galaxy on to his screen at the same time as the new target and adjusted both to the same scale. Colored sprays radiated from the core of each. But the sprays forming Galaxy were colored consistently, and Bob knew they were mostly coal. Among the sprays surrounding the new target he saw varied colors and shadings, indicating a much more complex site.

Using different color schemes, he shot four pictures of the screen with a Polaroid camera. Then he took them downstairs to the dining room and slid open the pocket door. As usual, Tommy was on the phone, but he was on hold. Bob walked over to his desk. “In the data from ’86,” he said, “we’ve got another anomaly.” He handed Tommy the pictures. “This is Galaxy, and this is the new target.”

Tommy studied the pictures and recognized the new site as the one Craft had dragged him out of his bunk to see about five o’clock one morning. Craft had called the site “Geo.” Tommy raised his eyebrows, nodded as though he found them interesting, unlocked his desk, and slipped the pictures into a drawer. “He immediately became very jealous of that information,” said Bob, “the same as I had done.”

Later that morning, Tommy went up to Bob’s office, and Bob had the two shipwreck sites still on the screen. Tommy gazed at them, then
looked at Bob with an expression that indicated he saw immediately what Bob had seen.

“It had these coal-like characteristics that Galaxy had,” recalled Tommy, “and that’s what we were looking for, comparative data, ground truthing. The more we looked at the image, the more we’d go, ‘Hey, look at this feature here, look at that feature there—this could be a sidewheel steamer.’” But he was cautious; the experts had been fooled before. They had now ground-truthed a few deep-water ships and were building a database, but understanding sonagrams was still tricky. “What was obvious to me,” said Tommy, “was that, Well, it’s no longer a 90-something percent chance on Galaxy; we’ve got new information.” Because the new target so resembled Galaxy, and because the targets shared the same differences from other targets, Tommy named the new target Galaxy II.

The two of them sat at Bob’s monitor, scanning, expanding, and false-coloring the image of Galaxy II, pulling from it as much information in as many ways as they could. Bob tried every program he could think to run on his new software. They scrutinized the target “a zillion ways.” They talked about the colors and developed theories on what they might mean. There appeared to be so much debris that at one point they even hypothesized that one ship had landed on top of another. “That’s a tough one,” said Bob, “that’s a tough one to reconcile.”

Tommy said, “If that’s a second ship right on top of another one, I quit.”

That was one of the reasons Tommy had moved toward deep-water ships, because they weren’t piled on top of each other, confusing the artifacts and the identity of each. The odds of that happening in this area of the ocean at that depth were so little they could hardly calculate them. Whatever was out there had to be part of the same ship. “I was excited that we had produced more data,” said Tommy. “The next question was, Well, what are we going to do about it?” How would they form an operating plan for the ’88 season with two targets, each requiring a different approach? They might need to excavate in the coal, they might need to move heavy wood, they might need to run more sonar surveys. Tommy decided to put Galaxy II on a parallel track.

“It was forty miles closer to shore, so it became obvious to me that instead of testing our winch and doing all that stuff off of Jacksonville in deep water, we’d go all the way out there and test our stuff at that site. If nothing else, it was going to help us understand what we’re looking at on Galaxy.”

B
EFORE
T
OMMY SET
to sea in 1988 he needed a ship. He could lease again, but he wanted to build stability into the project, to have a vessel he could use to protect the site if he needed to. With his own ship, mobilization would be much faster, the crew could be at sea in a few days, and they could stay at sea as long as they needed to; and they didn’t have to mount a new winch and a new crane and a new deployment arm and get used to a new deck every season.

“We were in all kinds of trouble financially,” admitted Tommy. But that was a short-term problem, and as always he had to juggle the short term with the long term, and long term he could see they needed a ship. Already he had counseled with some of his partners about the wisdom of buying their own ship, and he had assigned Craft to survey ships for sale, to find out how much the owners wanted, how much it would cost to convert them, and how soon he could get them to Jacksonville and have them ready for a June 1 departure.

In December, a partner named Gil Kirk called Tommy with a proposition: I buy the ship and you lease it from me at a nominal day rate; that way you’ve got a ship whenever you want it, and I have collateral; that leaves you whatever cash you can raise to spend on other things. Tommy liked the idea. Wayne Ashby liked the idea. Tommy called Craft and told him to speed up the search for a ship.

By February, Craft had located the
Arctic Ranger
, a thirty-year-old side trawler built for the Fisheries Research Board of Canada as a vessel for scientists to study fish stocks on the Grand Banks. It had no working deck aft and only a small foredeck, but it had a wet laboratory and ample cargo storage and comfortable bunks for thirty-two crew and scientists. About the only thing Craft didn’t like was the trawler’s size. He wanted at least 200 feet in length, a big open deck, and a 50-foot beam to give them more stability. The
Arctic Ranger
ran 180 feet stem to stern, 33 feet abeam.

Craft flew to Newfoundland, drove north to Goose Bay, beat the owner down to $167,000, and brought in an icebreaker to cut through ice two feet thick so Burlingham could get the
Arctic Ranger
to a shipyard in St. John’s. There, they hoisted her out, sandblasted and painted her, and gave her a quick overhaul, just enough to get the vessel through the Canadian steamship inspection, temporarily flagged in the United States, and down to Jacksonville, where they would begin the real conversion.

At the end of the first week in April, Burlingham sailed into Jacksonville, up the St. Johns River, and had the ship on shore power dockside, Pier 7, in Green Cove Springs the evening of April 9. He and Craft and a crew of carpenters, electricians, and day workers now had two months to transform the
Arctic Ranger
, old, frozen, Canadian fisheries research vessel, into the
Arctic Discoverer
, technologically unequaled deep-ocean recovery marvel.

Burlingham took charge of the ship’s crew, while Craft prepared for the conversion. For weeks Burlingham’s crew blasted and sanded the temporary paint job, and for another month they primed it all with a ruddy compound. Craft’s crew ripped twelve tons of junk out of the bowels, including old hydraulic units and generators, old wiring and fishing equipment, and much of her three-inch-thick concrete, which had to be jack-hammered out in sections. Craft hauled the bulk of it to the junkyard. He converted the electrical system, air conditioned the ship, replaced the generators, mounted the SAT COM unit, installed the deployment arm, installed the winch, installed the crane. For a control room, he stripped the fish lab down to the bulkhead, installed a new deck, new paneling, electrical connections, painted the whole inside black, and created a small electronics shop adjacent.

The conversion continued every day through April and into May and then into June, as the
Arctic Ranger
slowly became the
Arctic Discoverer
. By June they had seven day workers, then thirteen day workers, still cleaning and blasting and painting, ripping out and throwing away, retrofitting and realigning and upgrading, preparing for the techs to arrive and begin mobilizing. They worked on Saturdays, they worked on Sundays. They painted the entire ship, everything from the bridge to the foredeck and forecastle, the aft deck and the hull, all the way down to the waterline, in bright white. They added touches of blue along the
cap rail running the length of the ship, on the ladders, on the top of the short fore and after masts, and as a wide stripe around the stack. When they had finished, the new
Arctic Discoverer
looked shiny enough to be a hospital ship.

While the conversion continued in Jacksonville, Moore, Scotty, and the rest of the techs worked on the vehicle in a warehouse back in Columbus. Except for the low roar of a welder’s torch and the whine of a hand band saw cutting channel aluminum, the warehouse was quiet. And still. No wind, no sea, no pitching and rolling, no tools sliding, no water roiling at their ankles. They could work with both hands at the same time and leave parts lying about rather than having to put them in coffee cans duct-taped to the vehicle. In the evening, they could return to a comfortable room and sleep all night, so they had “some constancy of biological rhythm,” as Scotty called it.

By July, the conversion down in Jacksonville was complete except for the ship’s thrusters, two shafts twenty-two feet long, each ending in a six-foot bronze prop that would keep the ship dynamically positioned above the site. A manufacturer in Houston who had built thrusters for the U.S. Navy had convinced Tommy he could produce a set in time for the
Arctic Discoverer
to set sail on June 1. By mid-July, he still had not delivered.

The delay allowed Burlingham and Craft to continue their conversion into mid-July, but by then they had nothing to do but wait. They couldn’t leave without the thrusters, and everyone was getting tense. “We all started getting a little crazy,” said Burlingham. “I’m serious. We were all definitely going off the deep end.”

But back in Columbus, the delay provided more time for the techs to build the vehicle Tommy wanted. Moore called Burlingham frequently to find out the status of the thrusters and how much more time they had to work on the vehicle, and they continued to improve the lighting, the optics, the flexibility, the maneuverability.

Besides constantly working with the engineers, Tommy still met face to face with potential investors. Gil Kirk’s offer to buy the ship and pay for the conversion had freed up much needed cash. In May, John F. Wolfe, the most well-known of a small group of business leaders who got things done in the community, wrote Tommy a check for a million
dollars. But a million dollars and a ship would barely get them to sea with a vehicle that worked; they still had operating expenses. “We were really getting into dire straits,” said Tommy. “I was raising money and talking to people all the way up to when we left.” Wolfe’s contribution made it easier for Ashby and others close to Tommy to persuade the partners to kick in another $1.5 million, and new investors had added a million to that. By August, Tommy had $2,500,000 to add to Wolfe’s $1,000,000 plus his reserves, enough to get him through the season, which already had been shortened by two months.

O
N THE 10TH
of August, the techs crated everything for transport down to Jacksonville and joined Burlingham, Craft, and the rest of the crew aboard the
Discoverer
. The entire operation now depended on the thrusters, which finally arrived on the morning of the 14th. “The problem was,” said Tommy, “we always thought the thrusters were going to work. The guy’d say, ‘Just one more week,’ or ‘We got to machine these parts,’ and then they’d come back and they were machined wrong. It just went from one faux pas to another with those things.” The crew had problems with the diesel engines that ran the thrusters’ prime motors and problems with the hydraulic pumps. They couldn’t get one of the thrusters to turn over because the engine was full of water.

“I’m just livid,” recalled Buck Patton, “just livid. They send him this piece of shit, and they’re late on delivery, and when it gets there it’s all wrong and Tommy has to rebuild it. You know? Everybody was upset and rightfully so, because they had a very short weather window left.”

Just after lunch on August 19, a tug pulled the
Arctic Discoverer
from the dock in Green Cove Springs and dragged it downriver. The tug cut them loose just above Jacksonville, and they headed for a marina at the mouth of the St. Johns, where they remained for another seven days, working on the thrusters, checking for hydraulic leaks, trying to get them to talk to the dynamic-positioning computers.