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The Bounty Hunter (continued)

Then there are advances in the ROVs themselves. Treasure hunting is benefiting from a rash of robot R&D funded by the government and the oil industry. Last year, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution introduced Jason II, a $2.5 million bot developed for the National Science Foundation that can dive to 22,000 feet - giving it access to 98 percent of ocean floors. Houston-based Oceaneering is building ROVs that do maintenance on underwater oil drills as well as take on high-profile tasks like recovering the remains of TWA Flight 800 and pulling up a military helicopter from 17,000 feet. Meanwhile, as the tech gets better, it also gets cheaper, trickling down to treasure hunters. An entry-level, shallow-water ROV now costs about $20,000.

Ken McCray
Ken McCray
Stemm's crew launches a side-scan towfish for a bathymetric survey of the ocean floor.
When it comes to hauling up the bounty, sophisticated deepwater excavator bots are still expensive to purchase outright. Such ROVs are designed to install cables and repair leaks at depth. They come with 100-plus horsepower and complicated mechanisms like a triaxial magnetometer, designed to sniff out buried cables at great depths, and high-pressure nozzles to cut through clay. They can run $3 million or more.

With some tinkering, they can retrieve fragile artifacts. For the Sussex effort, Odyssey will lease an ROV designed for cable maintenance work and customize it with acoustic positioning, a "sticky grid" video system that provides a virtual archaeological layout, a multi-tiered elevator, and, of course, a grabber attachment. "It's spring-loaded," says Stemm, "like one of those games you see in a barroom."

We're aboard the Odyssey, a 113-foot research vessel equipped with a stern-mounted A-frame crane, two ROVs, a couple of side-scan sonar towfish, enough computer and video equipment to do light recovery work in a few thousand feet of water, and a massive roll of steel-armored fiber-optic cable. The crew of 10 has been traveling all night in search of a spot some 60 nautical miles off the coast of northern Florida, intent on finding the Bavaria, a steamship that went down in 1865.

Loaded with an estimated $50 million in gold and artifacts, the Bavaria was carrying carpetbaggers from New York City to New Orleans after the Civil War when it encountered a hurricane. "We have records of the last place it was spotted, and we have to ask, were they just getting to the edge of the hurricane, or were they right in the middle?" says crew manager Ernie Tapanes. "We have a search area of 600 square miles."

Courtesy Odyssey Marine Exploration
Courtesy Odyssey Marine Exploration
An inspector ROV.
The Odyssey had spent the summer of 2002 mapping the area, at a cost of roughly $5,000 a day, and identified 50 targets that could be the Bavaria. Now, with data in hand and the promise of good weather and calm seas, the crew is hoping to drop an inspector ROV and survey four sites over the next three days. But at the first location, waves are pounding the sides of the boat. The horizon appears, disappears, and reappears in between 6-foot swells. The rocking makes it tough to stand, much less walk, and far too dangerous to lower a quarter-ton robot over the side.

Captain Sterling Vorus decides to hover awhile, hoping the weather will turn. It doesn't. The all-night trip was for naught. Disappointed, the Odyssey turns around and begins the slow trudge to shore. On the way back, Stemm offers to show me how the mapping was done. I grab the railings and, hand over hand, follow him to the ROV shack, a 12- by 12-foot room at the stern jammed with monitors, radios, weather-monitoring devices, and PCs. Treasure-hunting mission control.

As it turns out, mapping the seafloor is a lot like mowing a lawn. The ship drags the towfish - a roughly 7-foot-long, bright-yellow steel missile - on a few miles of cable. Depending on currents, the sonar-scanning begins, say, north to south, revealing anomalies on the seabed. "We can find anything bigger than the size of a chair," says Stemm. If the crew needs a closer look at something, the ship changes course and runs east to west, creating a crosshatch. For the ship's captain, the trick is to maintain a strict course - up and back, overlapping slightly on each pass - and not to let the device hit bottom. The towfish is neutrally buoyant - it neither sinks nor floats - but an unexpected ridge, or the jutting mast of a downed sailboat, can come up fast.

For the tech who's examining the data feed on a monitor, the challenge is simply staying awake. Mapping occurs 24/7 until it's done. Most of the time, the seafloor scrolls by as a stream of nothingness. It's like searching for a single cloud in a gray sky. "People have been known to nod off between 3 and 5 in the morning," says Tapanes. "There are areas where you'll go 12 hours and not see a thing."

When the sonar waves encounter something other than sand ridges, it shows up on the screen like a birthmark. A small wood boat appears as a jagged dot the size of a thumbnail. Anything with sharp edges or metal components, which deflect sonar waves with greater force, shows more clearly. An image of a battleship looks like a photo negative. Over the years, the crew has found everything from Spanish galleons to what seems to be an F-16 fighter jet off North Carolina. They told the Navy about the F-16. The Navy shrugged. Apparently, it happens.

Stemm is eager to bring up the Sussex for its historical value, but he's never lost sight of a central question: Can he keep the booty? Stories are legion in the treasure-hunting world of adventurers who spent months excavating riches only to have governments or insurance companies step in and make a claim. In a 1998 book, Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, author Gary Kinder recounts the recovery of the SS Central America, a steamship loaded with 21 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush that went down in 8,000 feet of water off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. In 1996, treasure hunter Tommy Thompson went after the Central America and brought up millions of dollars in coins by developing new methods to work at depths once considered unreachable. He then spent a dozen years and millions in legal fees battling for the right to keep it.

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