tedious and frequently unrewarding nature of the search.
Searching can be absolutely maddening. You know the wreck
is there. It’s nearby. You can feel it in your bones. The historical
record tells you it’s there. Your instinct is to just go to a spot
and look, and then go to the next spot where you think it is and
look there. Nothing. Try again over here. Nothing. Try again
over there — and you do this repeatedly until you realize you
have absolutely no idea where the wreck is. What’s worse, you
have no real idea of where you have already looked. At this
point you either give up, or you get serious.
Getting Serious
If I were to teach a course about “getting serious” when
looking for wrecks, I would put one word on the board, and
we would spend the first three weeks just sitting in the room
and not saying a word. No reading, no texting, nothing but
sitting quietly, looking and thinking. At the end of the three
weeks, those who were still there would have learned the
first real lesson of wreck exploration: patience.
Traditionally, hunting for shipwrecks starts in the library.
Professional wreck hunters such as Bob Marx, David Trotter
and Bob Ballard will all tell you that research is where the
search begins. They know it can take days to search what
amounts to a pinpoint on a map, so the closer you can get
to a ship’s last known position before you start looking, the
better off you will be. Research, especially for older wrecks,
can be incredibly fascinating, but you can spend weeks
—
even years — searching through deck logs, old letters
and anything else that may contain a clue about a vessel’s
last location. I have spent many hours looking for World
War I and World War II wrecks, and we have found that
the average ship on the bottom with known coordinates
in the 1940s can be 10 miles or even farther from where
it’s supposed to be. And these are navy ships with expert
navigators and meticulously kept records that went down
only 70 years ago. What about the wrecks that are 500
or 2,500 years old? Fortunately, we live in an age where
technology is ubiquitous, and many brilliant people have
created tools for scouring the bottom of the ocean.
Leveraging Technology
In 1985 Bob Ballard found the most famous shipwreck in
the world — the RMS Titanic. During the third search trip
for the Titanic, after a week of poring over the bottom of
the Atlantic, it was located using a towed camera array
nicknamed Argo. That particular trip was funded in part by
the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and run by Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution. It was a joint effort to hone skills
using the Argo platform in deep-ocean survey work. Argo
would go on to find the Bismarck just four years later in
more than 15,000 feet of water.
82
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fall 2012
Above, from left: Crew prepare a manned submersible
for a descent to 7,500 feet on the Eastern Pacific Ridge.
The National Park Service (NPS) prepares to deploy a
side-scan sonar off the Florida Keys. NPS staff patiently
watch display screens.
Evan Kovacs