Deep Salvage

An underwriter pays three surveys' worth for one hull survey — what you pay a man to say a hard thing in a room full of lawyers. The M/Y *Halcyon* is insured for $3.2 million and has been six weeks in ninety meters, deep enough that no diver ever swims down and reads her. She sits upright on her keel, square and level and undamaged, the way a boat sits when nothing happened to her.

Her sea-cocks stand open. Her hold is stacked with cases, mesh bags and modern packing foam, and inside the foam is three-hundred-year-old Spanish treasure. It never came up off any bottom. It was carried down.

The *Marisol* lies in eighty-eight feet of Georgia water, her booms folded, her net drum wound tight, her deck stowed like she was going to a boat show. Two sea-cocks stand open on their stems. Her fish hold has no ice machinery and does have welded steel racks bolted to the deck, with the paint under them worn to bare metal and stained copper-green and silver-black.

She was never a fishing boat. She was a hearse, running old money home load after load, until somebody sank the hearse. Off her bow a drag scar runs east, dead straight, past the three-mile line into water no shrimper works.

Everybody's grandfather tore a net on something off the St. Marys entrance. Everybody's uncle marked it and lost the mark. Sixty years of it, and no wreck register in either state has a line for it. Dot Calloway has been writing grant applications since before Meridian owned a boat, and this spring one came through: $42,000, four working days.

What is down there is a hundred and seventy-three feet of steel lying upright in a hundred and fifty-two feet of water, with a gun mount forward and depth-charge racks in rows. The growth on the barrels is eighty years thick. Nobody ever came for her.

The *Cordelia* is a hundred and forty-two feet of Bath-built steam yacht that tried the bar of Cumberland Sound in an 1898 northeast gale and did not cross. Nine aboard, four lost. The shoal that drowned her packed her to the rail in clean sand and kept her, and she is the most intact wooden-hulled steam yacht in American waters, in thirty-one feet of water.

Georgia says she is Georgia's. Florida disagrees. Meridian is hired as neutral surveyor of record — $58,000, no contingency, one job: say where she is. The survey puts her forty yards from where the state's file has put her since 1974.

A run-off company exists to pay out what an underwriter who is dead still owes. Hollis Kirtley administers four hundred such files and has closed most of them. His letter is cheap stock, two colors out of register, and a flat thirty-six thousand dollars and no contingency. Three deliverables: the hull, the bottom, the sheen.

She has stood on that bar since 1959, and everybody on that coast has a picture of her. Four assessments in four decades, by four careful people, and every one of them looked at the part that stands above the water, because that is the part somebody was paid to look at.

A cable company pays twenty-two thousand dollars to be told what the seabed is made of, and the line crosses a ship every dragger between St. Marys and Ponce Inlet has known the position of since his father told him. Nobody aboard stands up.

The *Ella Quintrell* went down in a gale in 1966, every man taken off alive, and she has been a hang ever since — a place you do not put your gear. Three hundred and fourteen feet of steel in two hundred and twenty feet of water, with eight hundred tons of copper in her. She is too deep for air, and everything past air costs a boat with a spread on it.