Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [37]
Shortly after his meeting with Kirkwood, Houtz learned of the other principals in the operation. Tony Aleman was the son of a former Mexican president. Robert Lynch was the president of a savings and loan. Bruce McMahan, the heir to a chain of furniture stores, owned a fleet of abalone boats and a rock quarry in Ensenada. When it came time for the men to name their new nation, Kirkwood liked the ring of “Lemuria,” after a long-rumored lost continent of the Pacific said to have disappeared in a cataclysm thirteen thousand years ago. For some reason, though, the media latched onto the name “Abalonia,” and this was the name that stuck.
Kirkwood’s idea was simple. Dump enough of McMahan’s boulders atop Bishop Rock and then sink a rock-filled barge atop that pile of rocks to return Cortes Bank to its previous life as an island. This would allow the Abalonians to plant a flag and establish a “monument,” something akin to a mining claim, atop a shoal that, despite a U.S.-maintained warning buoy, clearly lay in international waters. The monument would quickly be surrounded with a growing donut of Mexican boulders and filled with a jelly center concocted of LA’s landfill rubbish. Houtz met McMahan at a Tijuana watering hole to discuss how best to barge his rocks a hundred miles out to sea. “He was a little older than me—thirty-three, thirty-four. He seemed like kind of a spoiled kid. Nice enough, though. Where we met, they all knew him. All the chickees—everyone was around him.”
Hours of brainstorming eventually led Houtz to a brilliant, seemingly simpler plan. Rather than scuttling a low-lying barge, it would be far easier to buy a big old ship, scuttle her on a level, shallow stretch of seafloor right around her actual waterline, and immediately surround her with rocks. Were the ship high enough out of the water to be inhabitable, her owners would create a more legally defensible “monument,” along with a revenue-producing seafood factory from the get-go.
Eventually, with enough of McMahan’s boulders and LA’s trash, you could conceivably end up with a glittering seven-mile-long, three-mile-wide island resort atop the shoal’s mesa-like reaches.
Kirkwood loved Houtz’s idea. Heaven knows what the Kinkipar would have made of it.
Jim Houtz quickly found that the existing nautical charts created through the years seemed to record slightly different depths for Bishop Rock—perhaps lending some credence to Flippy Hoffman’s rumor that it had once been dynamited. There were also simply too many gaps in the charts for a detailed picture of the bottom. Houtz would need to spend considerable time atop Bishop Rock—watching wind, waves, currents, and most of all, diving. By spring of 1966, he was making regular forays aboard his forty-three-foot, twin-engine sportfisher Rainbow’s End.
During these trips, Houtz felt he witnessed nearly every sea the Cortes Bank was capable of dishing out—from swimming pool calm to blitzing winds and seas. He watched sizable waves crash above Bishop Rock, but nothing that might not be mitigated with a truly massive breakwater. He likened the approaching waves to a rolling barrel. The water actually only moves up and down while the barrel rolls. The key, then, was to shatter that barrel with McMahan’s boulders.
The best spot to lay a ship seemed to be off the southwestern edge of Bishop Rock’s two-and-a-half-fathom peak, about a third of