Into the Deep by Robert D. Ballard

Author:Robert D. Ballard [Ballard, Robert D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Disney Book Group
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

OUR TEAM ON RESTLESS M did not have a good first day. We were testing the sonar when the ship jerked violently and the tow cable got hung up on something—it was never clear what, but it was big enough to turn the boat all the way around. It took three days to fix the cable, a waste of valuable search time. Then, when one of the mates on the bridge misunderstood our directions—thought we’d said go right when we’d said left—we ran aground. So we had to work ourselves off the bottom, and that set us back again, making our lives even harder. We were like the Keystone Cops, one stupid mishap after another.

But then we began finding targets: two airplanes and something that looked like a destroyer, surrounded by debris near the base of the volcano on Savo Island. Over the next several days, we also made a run past the Australian heavy cruiser, H.M.S. Canberra, one of the largest ships sunk there. U.S.S. Atlanta, a lighter cruiser, was harder to find, but we finally located her resting against a steep cliff in relatively shallow water.

Barbara’s watch team, led by my longtime Woods Hole colleague, Andy Bowen, had originally given itself a grandiose name: Bathymetric Acquisition and Target Tracking Legion of Experts, or BATTLE. But after Commander Raney’s team, the Savo Seekers, found most of the initial ships, everyone chuckled when we changed the meaning of the acronym to Below Average Target Trackers with Little Experience.

Just as we seemed to be settling into a good routine, smoke started pouring out of the generator that ran our winch, and we had to reel in the sonar equipment by hand. We were past the halfway point of the time we had for the expedition, but we still didn’t have any color stills or video images of the ships we had found.

We limped back into port and headed to our hotel in Honiara.

For the next three and a half days, we waited for a local electrician to fix the generator. I was buzzing with impatient energy, and not even watching The Godfather Part III at the hotel could assuage my frustration. “Losing valuable time,” I wrote in my diary. “Could have found two to three more ships. Damn it.”

The hotel was fairly primitive, but it had a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms, which let us escape the heat and humidity and catch up on our sleep.

Sort of.

During one of our first nights there, Barbara’s screams woke me up. I jumped up and frantically scanned the room. All I could see was my shaken wife.

She just pointed at the headrest above the bed.

She had stashed a half-eaten energy bar on the ledge above her pillow, and now a giant cockroach was going to town on it. She’d opened her eyes and seen this massive, mutant thing three inches from her face. My memory is that Barbara absolutely lost it, but she says she would never have lost her cool over a cockroach.

Another day, Barbara was out by the pool, reading a book, when she heard bloodcurdling screeches.

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