> >Magazine Spread 2
New Magazine Spread 2 View larger

Magazine Spread 2

M00186077

New product

In stock

$0.00

More info


 
August 2008
 • Adventurescape 35
 
t was supposed to have been a straightforward salvage job
,or at least as straightforward as these things are in the moody waters of the North Sea. A trawlerman known as “Killer” Cox had snagged his net on something in about 80 feet of water in North Yorkshire County’s Filey Bay, and with nets costing upwards of a thousand dollars a throw, he was anxious to get it back. Cox knew that his neighbor, a man named John Adams, then 28, worked as a commercial diver on the offshore oil platforms up in Scotland, so Cox phoned to see if he’d go down and free it up for him. Adams said sure.  This was Adams’s bread and butter. When he  wasn’t tending to the oil rigs or manning the
deck of a trawler himself, he ran a protable
sideline in salvage in the town of Filey, usually
retrieving lost shing gear or untangling ships’
propellers—but sometimes, more lucratively, going down to strip the old copper boilers
and bronze ttings from the dozens of World
 War I–era wrecks that were strewn around the bottom of the bay, bringing them up to sell for scrap. The Kaiser’s U-boats had been particularly active along this stretch of the  Yorkshire coast, and as Adams swam down into the silty gloom that day, following the lines of the tangled net, he assumed Cox must have caught it on some of their old handiwork. Instead, groping in the darkness, he felt the huge wooden beams of a much, much older ship and made out a long section of wooden hull, half buried in silt, stretching into the blackness. Adams grew up diving these waters. Yet he’d never come across anything like this, or heard of anyone who had. “They are virtually all steel  wrecks out there, 90 percent of them at least.
 You might see the occasional broken-up shing
 vessel, but nothing like this. This thing was huge.” As he ran his hand over the timbers, marveling at their size and age and strangeness, it dawned on him that he just might be touching the lost vessel of John Paul Jones. Jones’s ship, the Bonhomme Richard, was known to have sunk somewhere along this coast, shot full of holes after a ferocious battle with H.M.S. Serapis in 1779, a
ght Jones had won by sheer force of character,
scorning surrender with the words “I have not
yet begun to ght!” His ship, however, had never
been found. Abandoned and cast adrift after the contest, the smoldering hulk had bobbed around in the North Sea, at the mercy of the winds and
tides, for 36 hours before it nally succumbed,
leaving posterity with an enormous search area in a sea notorious for keeping its secrets. Over the years the old warship achieved an almost mythical status among the diving community: the holy grail of long-lost shipwrecks. And so it remains. Adams made that initial discovery back in 1975. As he would learn over the coming months, years, and countless dives,
nding a wreck and pinning a name to it are two
 very different things, particularly if the wreck you claim to have found is as famous as the
Bonhomme Richard 
, and all you have to prove it is a large chunk of broken hull that looks to be about the right age and shape. Still, intrigued by the mystery ship at the bottom of the bay, Adams has spent every opportunity since researching historic accounts and learning the ins and outs of carbon dating, dendrochronology, and 18th-century shipbuilding. With a small team of family and friends—now called the Filey Underwater Research Unit—he puts to sea in an old clinker-
built shing coble and returns to the site to sift through the ne black silt on the bottom,
looking for clues. a grandfather and working as a bricklayer, he takes two weeks off in the middle of each  July—the heart of Yorkshire’s short diving season—to search the wreck and hopefully lay the old mystery to rest.But Adams isn’t alone in the murk anymore. The past couple of summers, spurred by a boom in wreck salvage technology, two well-funded American teams have been trolling the shelf off nearby Flamborough Head with huge survey vessels bristling with state-of-the-art
remote-sensing gear to nd
 John Paul Jones’s lost ship,
condent that Adams has found
a different relic.Some big names are involved. Best-selling novelist and undersea adventurer Clive Cussler is leading one of the search teams, the National Underwater and Marine Agency (NUMA), which he funds mostly himself and which has compiled a formidable record over the years in tracking
down famously hard-to-nd shipwrecks. “The
Bonhomme Richard 
 is one of the few remaining
ships of notable signicance that has yet to
be found,” says Dirk Cussler, Clive’s son and NUMA spokesman. “For a great storyteller like Clive, it is the tale itself that adds much of the interest: the underdog role of Jones, sailing an aged merchant ship against a faster, more modern opponent and somehow winning the day. The U.S. has a limited maritime heritage before Jones, so for us, it almost all starts with him.”For the
Bonhomme Richard 
 search, NUMA has
chartered a 110-foot converted Dutch shing
trawler equipped with the latest in side-scan sonar and magnetometers—updated versions of the sophisticated remote-sensing gear that the group used with such spectacular success in 1995 to locate the wreck of the Confederate submarine
Hunley 
, despite its being buried under several feet of silt at the bottom of South Carolina’s Charleston Harbor. If there is anything left of the
Bonhomme Richard 
, NUMA
expects to nd it. Unless, of course, its equally
 well-endowed rival, the Connecticut-based
Ocean Technology Foundation (OTF), nds it rst.OTF, a nonprot organization, has spent tens of
I
thousands of dollars developing sophisticated drift-modeling software specially designed to
trace the nal movements of Jones’s ship after it
 was abandoned and set adrift. In an expedition partially funded by the U.S. government’s
Ofce of Naval Research, the team has secured
a 177-foot survey vessel, the
Oceanus 
. Its 12-member crew is using a remotely operated  vehicle (ROV), the
SeaEye Falcon 
, to investigate
ve potentially interesting deepwater targets.
“Jones was as great a hero to the Americans as Horatio Nelson was to the British,” says Melissa Ryan, OTF’s project manager and chief scientist.
“If we are able to nd his ship, it would be a
sensation.”Chasing down illustrious old shipwrecks for fun
and prot has become a
glamorous, high-stakes game these days, a buccaneering mix of leading-edge technology and hard-nosed business. Odyssey Marine Exploration, a publicly listed treasure salvage company based in Tampa, Florida, saw its share price leap 81 percent last May  when it announced that its divers had recovered 17 tons of rare coins (later valued at some $500 million) from an unnamed 400-year-old  wreck allegedly found off the tip of Land’s End, in England. Another ship, the
 Notre Dame de Deliverance 
,  which was lost off Key West, Florida, in 1755 and found in 2003, is now the subject of a bitter legal dispute. The 64-gun French vessel  was carrying (among other treasures) nearly a thousand pounds of gold bullion, 15,000 gold coins, a million silver coins, and six chests of jewels, worth an estimated $3 billion today.
But big nds are getting rarer all the time.
Sweeping advances in technology in recent years have meant that most of the world’s A-list shipwrecks, from the
Titanic 
 on down, have already been found and struck from the list. And as with unclimbed peaks and uncrossed deserts, each fresh conquest means there’s one less for the next dreamer who comes along. That’s  what makes the
Bonhomme Richard 
 so special. For a wreck hunter who wants to bag one of the truly big ones—one swathed in the kind of household-name glory that money simply can’t buy—this may be the last bite of the cherry.In their search for the BHR, the two American teams have each chalked out their own prime target areas, located, depending on who you’re talking to, between 12 and 30 miles out to sea.  The precise grid coordinates are, of course, a jealously guarded secret. The rivalry between the two teams is a courteous one—underwater archaeology is a small world where everyone knows everyone else, and friendships exist between the camps—but it is a rivalry nevertheless. Cussler’s group is known to be  working out of Captain Cook’s old home port of Whitby, about 30 miles up the coast from Filey, but where they go once they vanish over the horizon is eyes-only proprietary information. OTF is even harder to track, operating out of a southern port but keeping to sea day and night to maximize expensive ship time. Adams, who is as cagey as anybody else, can afford to be a little more relaxed: He is the recognized licensee of the mystery wreck in Filey Bay, and the site is protected under English law.  This past dive season, he invited me to come out on the bay with him. So I caught a northbound train out of London’s King’s Cross station as far as Leeds and from there changed twice more, onto smaller branch line trains that rattled through the pretty, rural Yorkshire countryside
and nally deposited me at the quaint old
 Victorian railway station in Filey. To understand how a ship carrying no treasure became one of the most sought after vessels
in the sea, you must rst understand the
ship’s history. That tale starts in 1779 when a 32-year-old Scottish-born seaman named John Paul was offered a commission by the newly formed Continental Navy, having scored some
“
It dawned on him that he just might be touching the lost vessel of 
 John Paul Jones
.
”
“
Carrying nearly a thousand pounds of gold bullion,
15,000 GOLD COINS
, a million silver coins, and six chests of jewels, worth an estimated
$3 BILLION”
 
 Wreck Diving is the rectreational scubing diving in and around sunken ships. Often wreck divers center their expedition on ancient sunken ships or other historical sites. More commonly however, the allure of wreck diving has come
from ships that are being turned articially into reefs with the beautiful sh and
plantlife that come with them.
 What is Wreck Diving?
1. Hawaii 2.Caribbean Sea 3.Guam
Image from Google images
 Top 3 Wreck Diving Locations in the world.
Adams dives for a second time to check out the wreckage of the Bonhomme RichardCannons and other wreckage from the sunken Bonhomme
Sunk: The Race to Recover the Lost Ship of John Paul Jones
   p    h  o   t  o  s    f  r  o  m   w  w  w .  s  x  c .    h  u