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Emlyn believed the freak wave phenomenon — that a tremendous wave smashed over Waratah and took her to the bottom. He theorized that the rapidly sloping continental shelf and the power of the Agulhas Current, combined with a severe gale, caused a series of gigantic waves that engulfed Waratah and drove her to the bottom. That she wasn’t a stable ship must not have helped during her struggle with a sea gone berserk.
Over many years, Brown pieced together every scrap of data pertaining to Waratah, with an emphasis on the reports surrounding her loss. Although maritime historians believed she went down much farther north due to sightings by other ships that survived the tempest, Brown bet his cards on the observations of Joe Conquer and D. J. Roos. Both men met not long after Roos claimed to have seen a ship lying on the bottom off the mouth of the Xora River, and they compared notes. They agreed on a location, and Roos drew a map with an X marking the spot.
They put the final resting place of Waratah four miles off the Xora River where its waters met the sea off Transkei Coast. This area is known as the Wild Coast, an inhospitable shoreline where severe ocean conditions prevail.
Roos followed up with several flights over the next few years but never again found the sea visibly clear enough to reveal a shipwreck on the bottom. Engine trouble and poor weather conditions also worked against him. Unfortunately, he was killed in a car accident, and his map was missing for several years before his family found it in the back of a desk drawer.
In 1977, a routine sidescan sonar survey by a South African university recorded an unknown wreck 360 feet deep several miles off the Xora River. The contact caused much speculation, but most historians ruled it out as Waratah.
After an unsuccessful sonar survey in the southern area preferred by historians, Brown became more certain than ever that the reports by Conquer and Roos of a wreck they swore they saw off the Transkei Coast pointed to the Waratah.
Believing wholeheartedly that the legendary ship could be found, I funded Emlyn’s searches, begi
Emlyn came back early in 1989 and attempted to lower cameras over the wreck. But little was accomplished, because the powerful five-knot Agulhas Current swept the cameras past the wreck and left him with only blurred images of the seafloor.
Later that year, he returned aboard the survey vessel Deep Salvage I. Using a sophisticated diving bell, Captain Peter Wilmot, master of the vessel, descended to the wreck and captured vague video footage of the hull. But again, the current was too much for the bell, and Wilmot’s video images fell far short of making a positive identification.
This was proving one tough mystery to solve.
Not one to give up against the odds of a Las Vegas keno game, Emlyn plunged forward. In 1991, he was on site with Deep Salvage I again, only this time he was accompanied by the world-famous scientist Professor Hans Fricke and his sophisticated submersible Jago, which was capable of diving to depths of nine hundred feet. It was inside Jago that Professor Fricke became the first person to observe and film living coelacanths in the ocean.
History repeated itself. The current again bedeviled operations during the ten-day mission, and Jago was never even launched.
Back to the drawing board.
In 1995, Emlyn was approached by Rehan Bouwer, a professional technical diver who believed he could reach the wreck during a carefully calculated Trimix dive, using a combination of three different breathing mixtures.
The first attempt was defeated by foul weather, and not until January 1997 did Emlyn and Bouwer’s expert divers make another attempt. Pushing mixed-gas decompression tables to the limits, Bouwer and Steve Mi
They were unable to reach the bottom, the unrelenting current sweeping them thirty-six feet over the wreck. At that depth there was little light from above, and they had to rely on dive lights. They didn’t see much, but there was no doubt in their minds that the vessel they’d drifted over was the size of Waratah. She was lying upright with a slight list. Most of her forward superstructure appeared gone, as if destroyed by a monstrous wave. During the thirty-five-second flyby, Mi
The dive plan allowed a descent time of only three minutes to reach the seafloor at 340 feet, where they spent twelve minutes. This was followed by a complicated decompression ascent lasting two hours. During the drift-decompression stops, the five-knot current dragged the divers far downstream from the wreck site before they could be retrieved. Rarely had technical deep diving been so severely tested without the slightest mishap.
Over the next two days, the dive team conducted three more descents but could not come close enough to positively identify the elusive ship on the bottom.
Sadly, Rehan Bouwer was later lost in a diving accident in June of 1998.
Undaunted, Emlyn teamed up in 1999 with Dr. Ramsey and his crew from the Marine Geoscience Unit to conduct a high-resolution sidescan sonar image of the wreck off the Xora River. Everyone was certain their highly sophisticated equipment would produce the final proof that the wreck was indeed Waratah. The expedition members set sail in June, which in the Southern Hemisphere is wintertime.
Astounding imagery was captured by the Marine Geoscience team, and all the early indications pointed to a high probability that the wreck was indeed Waratah. Closer inspection of the sonar imagery suggested that the dimensions and various features of the wreck seemed quite similar to those contained in the Waratah’s shipbuilder plans.
A black-and-white camera was mounted on the sidescan and towed seven meters above the wreck. This seemed to be the only plausible way of beating the strong current. For fear of losing an expensive sensor and camera, the gear was not swept as close as Emlyn might have liked. Yet Emlyn found good images that matched portholes, deck machinery, and winches, as the camera flew over the stem section like a kite.
Confident that the wreck was indeed Waratah, and dogged in his stubbor
Excitement began to mount when the team arrived over the wreck site. All systems were tested and okayed, the weather was clear without more than a four-knot wind, and the sea was calm. Since all attempts over the past eighteen years had been plagued by technical problems and adverse weather conditions, Emlyn could not believe his luck. Incredibly, even the notorious current seemed to have slackened. Seeing the flat sea, Emlyn thought it might be a sign. Conditions were too good not to have been touched by the wand of good fortune.
He and Dave Slater, the submersible pilot, slipped through the hatch and settled into their cramped positions. The crane lowered them into the water, and divers unhooked the lift cable. Once free, Slater took the sub down to the seafloor. Visibility was more than one hundred feet as the upright image of the ship’s superstructure came into view. Elation began to cool and was replaced by concern as they moved closer to the wreck. What they saw did not square with what they thought they should have been seeing.