“The crew took a vote, and she lost, so we traded her for two cases of beer to the first boat we ran into, about 100 miles north of Aruba. It was a gang of shrimpers from Savannah. They were headed back to port. . . . That was four years ago, and the girl is still in a state mental hospital somewhere out West.”
—Boat captain from Key West
Key West, FL—The sea is nervous tonight. Another cold front is coming in, a north wind is putting whitecaps on the waves. The Mako is tied up to a sea-grape tree just in front of my door, whipping frantically around at the end of its rope like a wild beast caught in a trap. I go out every once in a while to adjust the docking knots, but the line is still rubbing bark off the tree and my new Japanese wind sock has been ripped to shreds by the gusts.
The neighbors complain about my screaming, but their noise is like the barking of dumb dogs. It means nothing. They are not seafaring people. The only boats that concern them are the ones they might want to rent, and when a storm comes they hide in their rooms like house cats.
My own situation is different. I am now in the Marine Salvage Business, and cruel storms are the lifeblood of our profession. It is the nature of salvage to feed on doom and disaster.
My new partners moved quickly to consolidate our position. We formed a shrewd corporate umbrella and expanded at once into the reef-diving and deep-water game fishing business, in order to crank up the revenue stream while we plundered the odd wreck here and there, and searched for sunken treasure.
Capt. Elgin took charge of all fishing and diving operations, Crazy Mean Brian would handle plundering, and I was in charge of salvaging sunken treasure.
Our fortunes took an immediate turn for the worse less than 24 hours after we seized our first wreck, when the elegant teakwood mast on the doomed Tampa Bay Queen turned out to be split from top to bottom with a long spiral fracture filled with termites, black putty and sea worms. It was utterly worthless, and the rest of the ship was stripped overnight by what my partners called “filthy cowboys from Big Coppitt Key,” a gang of seagoing Hell’s Angels who have terrorized these waters for years.
“They stripped out a whole submarine one night,” Capt. Elgin told me. “The Navy left it open so the local school kids could take tours through it, but a storm came up and the Navy guys went ashore for the night, and by morning it was totally looted. They even took the torpedoes.”
Our only other asset was an ancient cannonball that Crazy Mean Brian had plundered from a site that he refused to disclose, because he said we would have serious problems “establishing jurisdiction.”
“There are a lot more of them down there,” he said, “along with at least two brass cannons, but we would have to drag them at least three miles underwater before we could file for salvage rights.”
They weighed about 1,600 pounds each, and they would not be easy to sell on the open market, due to the maze of conflicting claims already filed by other thieves, looters and competing treasure salvagers.
“Nobody took this stuff seriously until Mel Fisher came along,” Capt. Elgin explained, “but the way it is now you can’t come in with anything older than one of those green glass Coca-Cola bottles without having the whole federal court system on your neck.” He laughed bitterly. “If we try to sell this cannonball in town, Mel Fisher would have us in jail for piracy.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “I’ve known Mel for years. He’d be happy to help us out.”
They both hooted at me. “We’d be better off trying to rip souvenir teeth out of living sharks,” said Crazy Mean Brian. “You have no friends in the marine salvage business.”
I called Mel Fisher at once and arranged to tour his facilities on the Navy base in downtown Key West.
I met him at the Two Friends Patio, a chic hangout on Front Street, where the whole Fisher operation goes after work because, they say, they drank there for free before the Mother Lode came in.
Fisher, of course, is wallowing these days in gold bars and emeralds. He has discovered more wrecks than the Triple A in a New York blizzard, and he appeared on “Good Morning America” the other day to trumpet his recent finds.
The wreck of the fabled Atocha, a Spanish galleon that went down in a storm off Key West in 1622, was located by Fisher’s divers a few years ago and estimated to be worth about $400 million, mainly in gold and silver—but Mel said all that was chicken feed, now that he’d found emeralds.
“It’s into the billions and billions now,” he said.
Mel started out with a dive shop in the back of his parents’ chicken farm in Redondo Beach in the late ’50s. He’d moved from Indiana to California where his destiny was almost certainly to become heir to a poultry empire. In retrospect, and only recently so, Mel seems to have chosen the wiser path.
There are 12 boats in the harbor tonight, and four of them are ours. My 17-foot Mako is the smallest of the lot, but it is extremely fast and agile and it will go anywhere, day or night.
Crazy Mean Brian’s new boat is tied up just behind mine. The local charter fishermen are not comfortable with the sight of it, because it reminds them of the “old days,” when everybody was crazy. It is a 27-foot custom-built hull, with no name, mounted with twin 200-horse-power Johnsons, and it will run to Cuba and back on one load of gas.
Opposite Brian’s is Capt. Elgin’s 23-foot Roballo, the Bobbi Lynn— the reef diving boat—next to the gas pumps, shrouded in fog, and bounding around in the sea like some kind of rotted ghost out of Key Largo.
• • •
The kid came back and took the battery out of the boat again. It happened late in the afternoon, the second time in three days.
The first time he took it for money—which was dumb, but at least I understood it. The man was a fishhead, a creature without many cells. He was like one of those big lizards that never feels any pain when you rip off its tail, or one of its legs—or even its head, as they do down in Chile—because it will all grow back by dawn, and nobody will know the difference.
March 10, 1986