Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [38]
“We had a flat bottom—a beautiful bottom,” said Houtz. “And it was sandy. We’d dig up these cockles—clams—eight, nine inches. Huge, absolutely enormous. Good God, did they make good chowder.”
They found their ship—the one they would scuttle—in San Francisco. SS Jalisco was a mighty unusual vessel—the product of two facts of life during the years surrounding the great wars. First, the United States had an inexhaustible need for freighters. Second, steel was scarce, while concrete was relatively plentiful. The concept, then, was to create a ship-shaped lattice of steel rebar and surround it with a tough concrete called ferro-cement. The first of these concrete “Liberty” ships were rustproof, but slow, heavy, and fragile. In 1920, the concrete Cape Fear collided with the City of Atlanta at Narragansett Bay. She “shattered as if a teacup was hit,” according to Rob Bender of the Web site Concreteships.org, sinking in three minutes and taking nineteen crewmen.
The SS Richard Lewis Humphrey was one of twenty-four identical concrete ships rushed into service during World War II. Each of these so-called McCloskey ships was 334 feet long and weighed five thousand tons. Humphrey reportedly carried a load of coffee to the Pacific Coast before being damaged in a storm and sold to Mexico for scrap. It seems evident that someone in Mexico instead rechristened her Jalisco , and she continued to ply the Pacific until sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Houtz found her collecting rust and dust among the mothball fleet in Oakland’s naval shipyard.
For eighty thousand dollars, the Abalonians purchased this serviceable vessel with a flat bottom and twenty-seven feet of elevation between her waterline and main deck. Her price included a workroom filled with industrial-grade metal and woodworking tools and a discount for salvage removal of her main engine, turbines, and other sundry parts. She would draw far less than her normal twenty-six feet with her weighty running gear removed, and would have to be towed down from San Francisco behind a tug. Houtz calculated that after scuttling, her lowest stretch of hull would be better than twenty feet above the high-tide waterline at Cortes Bank. This was good, for it meant she’d make for an immediately dry and habitable Abalonia.
As Kirkwood was handling most of the sale itself, Houtz gave him his list of requirements: The two forward holds must be insulated for seafood freezing and refrigeration. Two auxiliary turbine generators, 50,000 and 250,000 watts, and two boilers were to be fueled and online. And both massive anchors, their 750 feet of chain, and the diesel engine that drove the air compressor for their winches must be operational.
The sole issue that caused Houtz pause was Jalisco’s meager array of four ballast pipes—each only four inches in diameter. The ship needed to fill with water and settle to the bottom quickly, and these would not do the job. Houtz said, “Kirkwood told me, ‘I’ll add more valves.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ I left all that stuff up to him.”
Houtz knew leaving such important nautical requirements to an admitted landlubber might be a mistake, but he was too damned busy running his dive shop and worrying about logistics. He decided that the best chance for success would come in having Rainbow’s End lay out a “runway” of buoys to direct Jalisco along and just to the north of Bishop Rock’s shallow ridgeline. Once in position, Houtz would lock her into a precise position along his runway by letting her drift backward in the southerly current and playing out her anchor chains. Ballast valves would open and Jalisco would settle forever in thirty-two feet of water. A veritable conveyor belt of McMahan’s boulders would quickly surround her.
Kirkwood tried repeatedly to take official channels to obtain