Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [46]
Houtz says that Bresler’s dramatic photographs, presumably shot from Polaris from the backside of the waves, don’t actually do the scene justice. On the Jalisco, the distance from the top of the bow to the waterline was thirty-two feet. Below the waterline lay another twenty feet of ship. Before the wave hit, it drew the water down probably ten feet below her waterline, thus leaving only ten feet of water for a cushion above the rock. “Kirkwood was hit by that wave, blown off the deck, then he might have fallen forty-five or fifty feet before he even hit the water,” he said. “Then the waves landed on him.”
The miserable men had a while together on the tug before being dropped off aboard the Polaris. Houtz had a broken rib, but O’Malley’s internal injuries were worse, yet even he would quickly recover. Lesslie, Kirkwood, and Dan were merely, and incredibly, only battered and bruised. A small team of FBI agents reached Polaris by helicopter. They asked Houtz basic questions about his role in the operation, but reserved the bulk of their interrogation for Kirkwood, who faithfully spun his yarn about the ship striking the rock in the middle of the night and their then being forced to scuttle her. True or not, this is the story that stuck, and it kept Kirkwood and everyone else out of jail. Captain Cliff Miller and his crew, in fact, earned a Coast Guard citation for Whitney Olsen’s rescue work.
No mention of McMahan’s five rock barges appears in Kirkwood’s written account. Houtz maintained that when things went to hell, their captain wisely and quietly slunk back toward Ensenada. The seas, however, became so rough that at least one of the barges sank, carrying with it a fortune in boulders and a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer, whose driver nearly drowned.
The Cortes Bank had almost killed Kirkwood, yet for months afterward, he lingered in the press, still broadcasting his grand plan for Abalonia. Other entrepreneurs floated their own nationalistic aspirations for Cortes Bank. Taluga would have been a glittering resort of three islands straddling the three shallowest shoals while the kingdom of Aphrodite would be built using classical Greek architecture with a government based on peace, tolerance, and love. Eventually, the U.S. Army Corps decided that the Bank lay on the U.S. outer continental shelf, and they forbade any further nation-building plans. Perhaps they realized that William Adger Moffett had actually claimed Cortes Bank for the United States back in 1911.
In the ensuing years, Jalisco would be pummeled by waves and eventually broken into three very jagged and very dangerous pieces. Despite this, she would become a popular spot for lobster and abalone divers. Today, she’s still down there, biding her time as more and more of her sharp, rusty rebar becomes exposed by the ocean and scattered across Bishop Rock. At least a portion of her hull seems to rest in a spot that, as future arrivals would eventually come to realize, makes surfing exceedingly dangerous.
Joe Kirkwood remained baffled over the United States’ demands that he cease and desist. “The most obvious reason for panic in the upper echelons of government is fear of another Cuba,” he wrote. “While I can see their reasoning in this respect, the thought is almost laughable, for never was there a more fervent capitalist than I. And not only because I’m a businessman with modest financial success in a capitalistic system. I sincerely believe that the need for possession is inherent in each of us, and any system which denies man gratification of that need, must strip him of all incentive, and eventually, a reason to get up in the morning.
“Washington had