The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  In order to fulfil my ambition to become an expert seagoing geophysicist, I joined every single scientific cruise I possibly could during my years at graduate school. One way or another I managed to go to sea on ten different cruises, totalling about three months in duration, which enabled me to become a proficient equipment operator. The highresolution geophysical gear that we used included acoustic profilers, sparkers and air guns, but my main interest was always the side-scan sonar. I quickly became the department’s resident expert, and by the end of my tenure at USF, Al Hine was having me give the lecture on the theory and use of side-scan sonar to the incoming class of students.

  As Al’s field research was primarily focused on the continental shelf, we were generally working in less than 200 metres water depth. I had no deep-water experience to speak of, so when I got the opportunity to join one last cruise that happened to be leaving from our dock to study a newly discovered community of cold-seep clams and tube worms found at the base of the West Florida escarpment, I jumped at it. This cruise appealed to me for a number of reasons. First, the co-principal investigator was the legendary Dr Fred Spiess of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who famously pioneered the use of deep-tow instruments for scientific mapping of the deep seabed. Second, the research vessel was going to be the RY Knorr, which had hit the headlines just the previous year when she was used to find the wreck of the Titanic. And finally, the study area was at a depth of 3,600 metres, which meant I would be exposed to a whole new set of instruments and methodologies.

  I couldn’t dream of a better way to cap off my graduate school career, which had just finished with the successful defence of my MSc thesis. This was an incredible opportunity to take part in cutting-edge deepwater research and to work with some of the best scientists in the world on the biggest and best ship I had ever boarded. Probably even more importantly, I had just run out of money for food and rent and was living on a friend’s sofa while I waited to hear if I was going to be offered the job at Eastport International for which I had recently interviewed. So I could easily add self-preservation to the list of benefits in joining a three-week cruise that offered a warm bunk and all the food I could eat.

  As I had anticipated, the cruise was an unforgettable experience and I learned an enormous amount. I came away with a whole new understanding of how to deploy and operate side-scan sonars in the deep ocean and with a confidence that I was ready for my career to move on to the next level. Partly out of necessity, and partly as a tactic, I gave Eastport a deadline as to when I would be making my decision about which job offer to accept, which meant they were going to have to call me at sea on an expensive shore-to-ship connection to let me know their intentions. While I knew that the radio office of the Knorr had been the scene of some extraordinary calls over the years, especially when Dr Robert Ballard announced they had found the Titanic, I can’t imagine that many people have used it, either before or since, as the place to receive and negotiate their first serious job offer. Eastport wanted me to grow their geophysical survey and search business and I was delighted to accept. I was also greatly relieved to know that when the Knorr docked back in St Petersburg, I would be moving on to a new and exciting life and not back to my friend’s sofa.

  From my first day at Eastport International, I knew that I had been given a marvellous opportunity to excel at a seriously cool and exciting company, but also that I would need to work extremely hard to get up to speed on a technical level. Eastport’s main business at the time was as a contractor for the US Navy Supervisor of Salvage (SUPSALV), maintaining and operating their deep-water remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), which were often called on in emergencies to recover US Government assets lost at sea. The company was full of engineers, mechanics, electronics technicians and pilots to ‘fly’ the ROVs – all highly skilled technical experts. My background as a scientist certainly impressed the management and helped me get my foot in the door, but among the guys I would be going to sea with it was only a curiosity. To earn their respect and become a valued member of the team I needed to know my stuff, backwards and forwards, and prove myself where it counted: offshore.

  When I joined Eastport in September 1986, their forte was the recovery of downed aircraft from deep water. The company operated a SUPSALV ROV called Deep Drone 6000 that could dive to a depth of 1,800 metres and either pick up small bits of aircraft wreckage with its two manipulator arms or attach lifting lines to recover an entire Chinook helicopter if necessary. Together the navy and Eastport had recently completed the recovery of the wreckage of the ill-fated Space Shuttle Challenger, which exploded in spectacular fashion shortly after take-off, killing all seven of its crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, who was poised to become the first schoolteacher in space. The accident, caused by a failed O-ring seal on the right-hand solid rocket booster (SRB), was a horrific tragedy seen live by millions of Americans – including me, watching from the opposite coast of Florida in St Petersburg.

  The recovery of Challenger was an enormously difficult project because the wreckage was spread over a huge area and pieces of the problematic SRB had sunk in the deep, swift-moving waters of the Gulf Stream. The salvage teams coped well with the difficult environmental conditions, but afterwards the navy decided it needed a more powerful ROV that could handle the worst-case combination of high currents and great depth down to a maximum of 6,000 metres – more than three times deeper than the existing Deep Drone could go. No ROV had ever dived so deep, and the development of this new ROV, called CURV III, turned into a race against another US Navy R&D centre to see who could reach this important milestone first. Because of my background in marine science, the first assignment of my new job was to compile a worldwide database of surface and subsurface currents and worst-case current profiles that would establish the key performance criteria for the new CURV. It would never have occurred to me as I watched the contrails of Challengers debris fall to earth on that sad day in late January that in a way I would owe my first job to that horrible tragedy.

  Dealing with deadly accident scenes was obviously something I was going to have to get used to. Objects that need to be found and recovered from the bottom of the ocean generally only get there because some disaster has occurred. Sometimes we were tasked to recover inanimate objects like test torpedoes that failed to float to the surface at the end of their run, or live Tomahawk cruise missiles that never reached their intended target. But mostly it was helicopters or jet aircraft, and in those cases the chances that someone had lost their life were usually quite high. I guess that everyone has their own coping mechanism, although it wasn’t a big topic of discussion offshore. Personally I found it helpful to remember that the job we were doing to assist the accident investigation teams was vital in the prevention of future accidents.

  It wasn’t long before I started to develop my own commercial clients outside Eastport’s normal base of US Navy and Defense customers. In the main these were industrial projects like the survey of proposed pipeline routes for the oil and gas industry. They were technically demanding, high-pressure tasks that were satisfying to complete but not as interesting as searching for lost objects. I had nothing against ‘big oil’, but working as a geologist in the industry, either as a geophysicist in the exploration for oil deposits or to determine the best locations for the placement of platforms and pipelines, simply didn’t appeal to me. So while these industrial projects were good, profitable work, what really got my blood flowing was when my small team was called on to search for something lost underwater.

  Often the key to a successful search is getting out on the water as soon as possible after the object is lost, when the memory of eyewitnesses is still good and physical evidence is fresh. The tendency for critical information to degrade with the passage of time is well known, so speed of response is of the utmost importance. We had to be ready, with our equipment fully operational and prepared to go, at all times, which meant being on virtually constant call twenty-four hours a day. This was especiall
y true in the search for sunken boats on Chesapeake Bay, the nearest large body of water, just ten miles away from Eastport’s offices. Our proximity to the bay was certainly bad luck for one boat owner, who, when putting his brand-new speedboat through its paces, stupidly decided to try jumping the wakes of larger ships for fun. Unfortunately for him, he mistimed one jump so badly the boat landed bow first, driving him and the entire vessel violently into the water.

  From his hospital bed the next morning, the boat owner claimed the sinking was caused by delamination of the speedboat’s fibreglass hull: basically a manufacturing defect. This claim placed the blame squarely on the boatbuilders, who reacted immediately by hiring us to locate and recover the vessel to determine the true cause of the sinking. It wasn’t just the $25,000 replacement cost of this single boat that concerned them; the delamination claim, if proven, would jeopardize future sales. Not wanting the owner’s claim to gain any momentum, they asked us to move as fast as possible to start the search.

  Several hours later, I was mobilized with my side-scan sonar on a small boat south of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, trying to decide the best place to start the search. A couple of eye witnesses had come forward to point out the general area they had seen the speedboat jumping wakes the day before. However, because their information was quite vague – no one had actually observed the boat crash and sink – I had no idea how long the search would take. Thirteen minutes later, I had the answer. A perfect boat-shaped target appeared on my sonar trace, ending the quickest search I have ever conducted, before or since. Less than an hour later, the boat had been raised by diver’s airbags and was under tow back to the dock so the builders could examine the damage carefully. When they saw that the bow had been smashed in, with no signs of delamination, they drove straight to the hospital to confront the owner. By that time my job had been done and I was on my way back to the office, but I would have liked to have seen the owner’s face when he was told his claim was being rejected, and that if he had any doubts he was free to inspect his boat himself as it was currently waiting in the hospital car park.

  After the first few years at Eastport I began to take on larger and more complex projects. The company was growing steadily and new milestones were being achieved all the time, including winning the race for CURV to be the first ROV to dive below 6,000 metres, and setting a new depth record for aircraft salvage (4,500 metres) by an ROV with recovery of a South African 747 jumbo jet that crashed while on fire into the Indian Ocean. My bosses were very happy with my work but it was impossible to be truly satisfied as we still hadn’t achieved our objective of improving the company’s side-scan sonar search capabilities to the same deep-water standards as our ROVs. Major advances like this often relied on the strength of a single project, and until then such a project hadn’t presented itself to us. That situation was about to change when in the summer of 1990 we were controversially awarded the contract by an Austrian criminal court to find the wreck of the MV Lucona.

  I

  MV Lucona

  MURDER AND FRAUD ON THE HIGH SEAS

  MV Lucona

  SUNK 23 JANUARY 1977

  6 died

  6 survived

  For a land-locked country like Austria, it might seem odd that the longest and most expensive criminal trial in its legal history revolved around the sinking of an ordinary merchant ship on the high seas. However, while the Motor Vessel (MV) Lucona was indeed ordinary, Udo Proksch, the man who chartered her for his own fraudulent purposes, was anything but.

  Although it required years of technical preparation, Proksch’s plan was brazenly simple. It went like this: charter a merchant vessel to carry your costly cargo to a non-specified Far East location; insure the cargo for 31 million Swiss francs (about $18.5 million) with an insurance company carefully selected so as not to question your claim; instead of the expensive uranium processing plant documented on the manifest, load the vessel with 288 tons of antiquated coal-mining and repainted wheat-mill equipment along with other worthless cargo; while supervising the loading of this fraudulent cargo secretly take on board a time bomb packed with enough explosives to completely obliterate Lucona’s steel hull; carefully set the bomb’s timer so that it explodes weeks into the vessel’s voyage when the ship is far from land and in very deep water, ensuring the crew has no chance of survival; and finally, after the bomb explodes and the ship’s shattered hull has plunged to the bottom of the Arabian Sea, entombing everyone on board in a steel coffin, submit your claim to the cargo insurers for reimbursement of your $18.5 million financial loss.

  The Lucona affair kept the chattering classes of Vienna entertained for years with tabloid stories of espionage, corruption and murder, culminating in the most sensational criminal trial Austria has ever seen, which claimed the careers and freedom of numerous conspirators and accomplices. The political fallout from the scandal was just as damaging, leading to the 1986 downfall of Udo Proksch’s beloved socialist party and the subsequent resignation of key government ministers connected to Proksch. In a country accustomed to scandal, the Lucona affair is considered to be the scandal of the century.

  Through the story’s various twists and turns, the one constant was that Proksch was strongly suspected of foul play right from the start, and his accusers and the authorities were determined not to give up on bringing him to justice. It may have taken thirteen years, but finally, in January of 1990, Proksch found himself on trial for six counts of murder, six counts of attempted murder, aggravated insurance fraud and wilful endangerment with explosives. His political connections, which he had counted on for intervention in the past, were now out of power and thus unable to help. For once in his life, he was on his own.

  The case against Udo Proksch in the Vienna Regional Criminal Court ultimately came down to two central questions: was his cargo what he said it was, and did he have the Lucona blown up? The only sure way to get the answers to these questions was to search for and find the wreck. Proksch himself realized this and said as much during a dramatic monologue in reply to one of the state prosecutor’s questions:

  ‘Where is this ship? If it’s sunk, it must have hit a mine or been sent to the bottom by a submarine. I don’t think the ship is lying on the bottom of the ocean. Find the Lucona!’

  Without this physical proof, the chance that Proksch could slip off the hook was very real. His defence was that the Lucona could have been lost in a number of different ways, all plausible and completely unconnected to him. It was even possible that the ship had been taken by pirates and was still in use, sailing around the world with a new crew and a different name. All these scenarios were designed to complicate the trial and introduce doubts that made it impossible for the state to prove its case without first finding the wreck and examining it. This probably explains why Proksch was so confident about standing up in court and virtually challenging the judge to find the Lucona. He could never have imagined it was a challenge that would be taken seriously.

  What Proksch and his defence team hadn’t counted on was the independent and slightly eccentric nature of the presiding judge, Hans Christian Leiningen-Westerburg, who decided that actually finding the Lucona was the only way to guarantee a fair trial. Many people in the Ministry of Justice opposed a search for the wreck, but Leiningen-Westerburg stuck to his guns and initiated an international request for tenders for the search. Although only a handful of companies around the world had experience of working in the extreme depths (over 4,000 metres) in which the Lucona had supposedly sunk, a remarkable twenty-two bids were received by the court.

  At the time, although Eastport was internationally known for its record-setting aircraft recovery work, mainly on behalf of the US Navy SUPSALV office, we owned none of the deep-water equipment needed to find and film the Lucona. Despite this, my bosses submitted a bold and highly speculative bid based on building or buying every single piece of equipment required and hoping to have it ready to start the search barely five months later, in early January
1991, as per the court’s timeline for the trial.

  Whilst we certainly had a better chance than most of the other bidders, Eastport were by no means favourite for the contract. Even when the list of bidders was reduced to thirteen and finally to a shortlist of three, we still figured we were only third best on the grounds of having no real track record of finding shipwrecks in such deep waters. In the deep ocean, experience is all-important, and there is no easy way to fill that void if it is missing from your team. Our guess was that our fiercest rival and competitor, Oceaneering International, a NASDAQ-listed company that could have bought us ten times over (and ultimately did three years later), was in pole position. So when a fax from Judge Leiningen-Westerburg arrived in late July 1990 naming Eastport as the court’s chosen search contractor and inviting our president Craig Mullen and vice president of operations Don Dean to Vienna for technical discussions, we were delighted and surprised in equal measure.

  Even if the names Udo Proksch and Lucona were largely unknown outside Austria, there was no doubt that this case, and the search, was going to generate a great deal of news coverage and public interest around the world. Solving the mystery of a high-seas mass murder by finding the wreckage of a ship destroyed by a time bomb could transform the fortunes of a company like ours virtually overnight, but only if we could deliver a successful outcome. With so much at stake, failing to find the Lucona would be disastrous for both the court and Eastport, with potential lifelong damage for the reputation of everyone involved.