Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder

Author:Gary Kinder
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1998-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

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AT ABOUT SIX hundred feet, the deep ocean squeezes out the last particle of natural light, and below that everything moves in blackness. The SeaMARC flew through that blackness, shooting sound waves at the deep-ocean floor, and the system recorded the behavior of those sound waves as they encountered hard objects. Then it converted that behavior to information the eye could see: squiggles on the chart recorders and pixels in a color mosaic on the computer display. Even when they dropped the SeaMARC closer to a target and tightened the swath, they still could see only converted sound waves, not the object that bounced them back. That’s what was so frustrating about sonar: You couldn’t see the thing itself.

On July 4, they retrieved the SeaMARC and left it on deck. For the next two days, they set up a subsea navigation grid, repaired the cable, and worked on the video system. They launched the SeaMARC again to run it over Sidewheel another six times, until they thought they could find it with a camera. Then they deployed the camera sled early on the morning of July 7. By 5:00 A.M., the camera trailed in the bottom darkness nearly nine thousand feet below.

They had clamped the lights, a video camera, and a still camera to a hydrodynamic sled, but the cameras were stationary, aimed straight down, with no thrusters to position the sled and no pan and tilt to control the cameras. All they could do was hope that their navigation readouts were accurate, that they could relocate the site and drag the camera sled across the center of it, and that the remains of a ship suddenly would glide into view.

Williamson called the searches “Brownian motion,” a phrase borrowed from physicists to describe the random movement of ricocheting gas particles. Tommy referred to them as “spaghetti searches.”

They directed the captain of the Pine River to proceed at a specified heading, while they sat in the control room and watched the television monitor. They had shut down the sonar recorders and the rest of the SeaMARC equipment—no gains to adjust, no nav to record, no measurements to take, just a film log to keep, a television monitor to watch, and one guy, the pilot, ready to raise or lower the camera sled dragging behind the Pine River.

To see any detail, the camera had to be within twenty feet of the object—ten feet was better—and if the camera was farther away than thirty feet, they could see nothing at all. As the pilot watched the monitor, he paid out on the winch when the boat heaved up and hauled in on the winch when the boat heaved down, trying to keep the sled flying at a steady altitude. If he let the camera rise higher than thirty feet off the floor, they saw nothing on the monitor but backscatter—“Just like looking at a fuzzy white TV,” said Lettow. To get the camera back in range so they could see the

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