TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 12.1

 

Three of us comprised the core of the Project's early "Home Office" in Columbus. Project founder Tommy Thompson and I were joined by Tommy's friend from high school, Barry Schatz. Barry was our communicator, writing Tommy's letters to his investment partners, and assuming the role of a second company spokesperson. Tommy's thoughts didn't always coalesce into words understandable to "normal people." So, Barry translated Tommy for the investors and the wider world. Often, I had to translate Tommy for Barry, the scientific and engineering jargon and concepts being nebulous or obscure, and sometimes fanciful.

Here are the three of us, on the bridge of our ship a few years later, in 1989.

 
Left to right: Tommy Thompson, Bob Evans, Barry Schatz

Tommy cajoled a neighborhood acquaintance to rent us spare space in his home. Jim was an attorney and a bachelor, and he had too much room in his sprawling, Victorian near-mansion on gentrifying Neil Avenue in Columbus. His house was well-appointed, with oaken interior frames, moldings, and mantlepieces, an appropriate setting for Tommy to host two or three investors at a time in the front room, in which we fashioned a sort of a business parlor. Jim gave us lots of space, although eventually friction developed between Tommy and him. I established my office in the second-floor front room, with a picture window overlooking the tree-lined avenue.

I would receive faxes from the ship, usually daily. Much of the communication had to do with coordinating supplies with Bob Hodgdon, our onshore logistics guy. Hodgdon and I were "the Bobs." We became known as Log Bob and Info Bob (the first of several nicknames given to me over the past 4 decades.) There were major issues with the initial supplies. Hodgdon was dealing with offshore issues on a coast with no offshore industry except fishing.

This was not Bob Hodgdon's first rodeo. He was a WWII veteran, serving in the wartime Merchant Marine, on Liberty Ships supplying the European theater. Multiple times, convoys in which he served were attacked by U-boats. In the 50's, he was part of a team using sophisticated Zeiss telescopes (acquired from the Germans during the post-surrender occupation) to track the flights of ICBM tests in the Pacific atolls. Later, in 1974, he served in some logistical capacity during the Howard-Hughes-backed, top-secret, CIA recovery of the sunken Russian nuclear submarine K-129 from the extremely deep Pacific seabed, over 17,000 feet deep.

This operation is legendary in deep-sea circles. It was also incredibly expensive, hundreds of millions of dollars, billions in today's dollars, backed at least partially by Hughes's fathomless pockets. But it was an amazing Cold-War intelligence coup. Secrecy had been absolute! It was a "mining test" for deep-sea manganese nodules, and the cover story worked. The Russians never found out we had their sub until well after the operation. In my experience, Bob wouldn't talk about it, except to say that they should never have talked about it.

He was perfect for our own top-secret project. He knew every place to acquire everything the expedition might need, from technical gizmos to watermelons. His demeanor was congenial, like somebody's affable old grandfather, a role he also enjoyed.

Our search plan had been guided by thorough historical research and sophisticated math. Encompassed within the highest probability area (essentially the "bullseye") the survey had imaged an anomaly that looked very much like a sidewheel steamship. Transoceanic sidewheel steamships were a product of only a 30-year period, and only three had sunk in deep water, far off the southeast US coast: the Evening Star (a hurricane in October 1866,) the Daniel Webster (the same storm,) and the Central America, nine years earlier.

The SeaMARC 1A sonar could switch from tracks covering 5,000 meter swaths to higher resolution passes of 1000m or 500m, without retrieving the fish to the ship to adjust the electronics.

This saved a lot of time, since the fish trailed the survey vessel by 3 miles or so when under broad-swath survey operations. When they detected a large anomaly, almost certain to be a shipwreck, inside the bullseye of our map, it called for a closer look, and they performed several passes from multiple directions near the target, to image it from as many angles as possible. One image of this shipwreck was astonishing, and seductive. It showed the "sonic shadow of a sidewheel," cast upon the seabed next to the shipwreck.

 

In 1987, we visited this site with eager anticipation. Our hopes were dashed almost immediately when we saw the previously promising shipwreck with good visual cameras, instead of just sonar images and a couple passes with an unwieldy camera sled. "Ground truthing" the sonar operators call it, and they envied us our opportunity to compare the pictures they made with sonar to what was really there.

But, once we arrived at the site, we found that our proposed dream treasure shipwreck was apparently a burned-out hulk, with the hull's walls collapsed in such a way as to cast that tantalizing sonic shadow looking so much like a sidewheel. What about the two "masts" that seemed to corroborate the identification of the shipwreck as the Central America? Well, this was another illusion, a long line of anchor chain that trailed out of the middle of the wreck, extending out into the surrounding seabed, and then looping back to the stern.

Tommy, Barry and I huddled to consider our next moves, just as another survey vessel appeared on the horizon. We watched the drama unfold in slow-motion as a nautical pas de deux ensued. We plotted our own position (latitude and longitude,) as well as the range and bearing of the new visitor. Within an hour, this revealed quickly that the mystery vessel was proceeding in a straight line with its speed at around 3 knots. There is no reason for a ship to be doing this in this part of the ocean, unless it is conducting a towed survey. No question about it.

Rivals were looking for the Central America!

 

To read the complete article, see:
Treasure Talk: Episode 12 Part 1 – Identifying The Shipwreck (https://finestknown.com/treasure-talk-episode-12-part-1-chaos-and-opulence/)

For the complete series, see:
Category Archives: Treasure Talk with Bob Evans (https://finestknown.com/treasure-talk-with-bob-evans/)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n12a12.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 2.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n13a17.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 2.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n14a15.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 3.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n15a16.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 3.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n17a16.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 4.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n18a13.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 4.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n19a20.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 5.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n22a13.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 5.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n23a16.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 6.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n27a14.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 6.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n30a21.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 7.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n32a16.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 7.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n40a15.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 8 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n42a21.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 9 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n49a19.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 10.1 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v28/esylum_v28n51a17.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 10.2 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n01a09.html)
TREASURE TALK WITH BOB EVANS, EPISODE 11 (https://www.coinbooks.org/v29/esylum_v29n04a13.html)

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