Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [25]
Lee Bastajian’s Los Angeles Times piece on Mel Fisher’s first major expedition out to the Cortes Bank in 1956. “The whole thing,” Times reporter George Beronius would later say, “it was just a complete fiasco.” Image courtesy of the Los Angeles Times.
I recently met George Beronius and his delightful wife, Eleanor, on a sunny October day in Santa Barbara Harbor. Now in his eighties, bright-eyed, and in possession of a wry sense of humor, Beronius was shocked when I showed him pictures of the giant waves the Bank is capable of delivering. “When we got out there, the water was calm and flat—just like a lake,” he said. “To think what you’re telling me with 40- to 70-foot waves. That would have scared the bejeezus out of me. If I’d known that, I’d never have gone.”
Beronius joined twenty-three others at Newport Harbor aboard an aging seventy-five-foot charter fishing boat, Via Jero, on a drizzly morning. Beronius later wrote in the Times: “Everyone was in high spirits, brought on in part by the knowledge that each on board was to receive a share of the $700,000 gold treasure, just as soon as we could pick it up off the ocean bottom.”
Fisher showed Beronius his map, claiming it came straight from an Acapulco museum. The young reporter was skeptical, but listened eagerly. Fisher then showed him the sled. Beronius told me: “It was really two-by-fours and some chicken wire with a glass meter on it that was supposed to detect metal. My impression was that his map—it wasn’t some chewed up, weather-beaten piece of paper—was just an ordinary map with markings. I was actually under the impression that the whole thing was kind of a fraud or a lark. That was how the editors saw it, too. A bunch of kids going out with a crazy guy and a phony map. But everybody all kind of just went along with Mel.”
Via Jero reached the Bank the next morning, anchoring alongside the clanging Bishop Rock buoy in a steady rain. The divers were soon leaping cheerfully into a placid ocean. Cliff Hanson, a retired speedboat racer, first tried out his own 150-pound motor-driven sled—which may have actually been a disarmed navy torpedo—that he called a “sub-glider.” Unfortunately, the machine’s nose shattered due to the depth pressure, rendering it inoperable. A few hours later, water pressure also shattered the glass of the viewfinder on Fisher’s chicken-wire magnetometer.
The mission then degenerated into a wine-fueled lobster fest. “The water was so clear,” said Beronius. “You could see the rocks and all the growth. There wasn’t much agitation at all. We brought up the biggest damn lobsters you ever saw. That certainly did help mitigate the fact that we didn’t find any treasure.”
The divers hunted, drank, and feasted for two days, heading home at sunset on the second day. Beronius awoke at around 1 A.M. , feeling a searing heat radiating from the bulkhead alongside his bunk. “I said, ‘That ain’t right,’ and went to tell the captain.”
When Captain Irving Chaffee opened the engine room hatch, a giant geyser of flame erupted. Beronius and the crew grabbed extinguishers, but the rubber hoses were so rotten, they disintegrated. Everyone formed a bucket brigade. “But we didn’t even have buckets,” he said. “Just dishpans from the galley.”
As the fire neared a fifty-five-gallon fuel drum, the first mate suggested to the captain that it might be high time to call the Coast Guard. “The captain replied, ‘Well, I suppose we could do that,’” said Beronius. “He called them. But when they asked, ‘Do you need assistance?’ He said, ‘No, we’re okay.’ We were okay? We were on fire and we’d lost an engine. Turns out he didn’t want them to know that he didn’t have a charter license.”
Moments later, the first mate volunteered to don a water-soaked wetsuit and a tooth-to-toe wrap of wet towels. He waded into the inferno and managed to heave water directly onto the flames. The fire was extinguished.
Via Jero continued on its remaining engine, but Beronius was spooked and unable to