Hello, Old Friend
May 31, 2004
Dr. Robert Ballard (in yellow jacket) launches "Hercules" over the side of the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown on May 30, 2004. He has reached the site of the Titanic shipwreck and will begin photographing and mapping the site by nightfall.
Photograph by Bert Fox © National Geographic Society
After more than five hours of searching across the ocean floor with remotely controlled cameras, Dr. Robert D. Ballard found what he was looking for shortly after 11 p.m. ET Sunday: The bow section of Titanic. "The back end is all sandwiched," he said into his control van microphone as the clouds of sediment cleared. Then, "That's a boiler!"
The moment was fittingly parallel to 1985, when Ballard's search team confirmed its original discovery by seeing one of Titanic's boilers on video.
After the monotony of the science crew looking at mud, coal, old submersible tracks, and fish, high-definition images of the promenade deck, a davit, and rusticles began to fill the video monitors aboard the surface ship Ronald H. Brown.
The remotely operated vehicle Hercules and towed sled Argus reached the ocean floor shortly before 6 p.m. ET Sunday and then traveled at fractions of a knot through the debris field until they came upon the torn end of the bow.
Surprisingly clear weather allowed the exploration vehicles to be launched Sunday afternoon.
The crew first saw an indication of Titanic at 12:43 p.m. ET on the monitor of the Ron Brown's sub-bottom profiler, a sophisticated echo sounder. The color-coded data showed the broken bow as a purple, peanut-shaped bump above a gentle, yellow-green curve marking the ocean floor. A small crowd gathered near the monitor to marvel at the significance of that violet dot.
"All right, everybody, let's go to launch position," expedition leader Ballard announced.
The bridge crew swung the bow to the west and locked the ship's dynamic positioning system into a "quartering sea." That kept it meeting the waves and five- to seven-foot swells at a 45-degree angle. Avoiding the alternatives ? rolling in the troughs, or smacking waves head-on ? minimized rolling of the deck.
At 1:40, a crane operated by Chief Bosun Bruce Cowden raised Hercules from the main deck and dropped it gently over the port side into the sun-splashed waters of the North Atlantic.
Herc's propellers slowly drove it behind the stern, where its yellow, syntactic foam buoyancy package held it just beneath the surface. Then the ship's A-frame lifted Argus and lowered it into the waves. The heavy, towed sled ? the size and shape of a small car ? plunged straight down as its cable paid out.
Herc and Argus remained connected by a tether. A yellow "football" of syntactic foam remained attached to the tether to help maintain slack.
With both vehicles in the water, there was little to do but wait. Herc's pilot drove it downward, while the cable lowered Argus like a cinder block.
Both vehicles carried good-luck charms.
Hercules suffered hydraulic problems a couple of weeks ago during a voyage to study coral in the sea mounts east of Massachusetts, ROV scientist Jim Newman said. Cowden offered to try to change the bad luck. He used a Dremel tool and a knife to carve a six-inch "smiling tiki" figure out of scrap wood to "keep us up and in good order."
The ROV crew attached the figure to Hercules and anointed it with hydraulic oil. Cowden and Newman agreed on what happened next: All problems vanished.
Cowden then carved a female tiki figure and attached it to Argus. Finally, after seeing nothing but gray skies since the ship left Boston Thursday, the crew asked Cowden to create a "sun tiki." He carved it Saturday night, and the sun came out just as he was attaching it to his crane Sunday morning.
Asked if he believed in the power of superstition, Newman deadpanned, "I think we proved it. It's a fact."
Dr. Ballard joked that Cowden ought to "carve a flag that's limp on a pole" if it would help calm the seas. The weather is expected to get rougher this week.
Return to Titanic, including a live broadcast from the shipwreck, will air at 9 ET/PT Monday, June 7, on the National Geographic Channel.
(Note: nationalgeographic.com does not research or edit dispatches.)
