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Shenandoah’s crash site in Noble County, Ohio, is well known and marked in a farmer’s field by a memorial. Macon went down in deep water off Point Sur, California, in 1937. A search was launched for her resting site because of a desire to find the Curtiss aircraft that she’d taken into the sea with her. An expensive deepwater project was successful in finding her remains and a few of her aircraft, but none was salvaged. Video pictures of the wreckage revealed that the planes were too damaged and corroded by the sea to be restored, so they were left to rest on the bottom of the Pacific.
That left Akron.
I wish I could write an electrifying tale of adventure about finding Akron that would fire the imagination and leave a lasting impression. But the search was nothing but a struggle against a violent and unrelenting world. A search of the archives at the Washington Library put me on the track of the salvage vessels that recovered pieces of Akron’s wreckage and brought it to shore on a barge. An examination of the log of the Falcon, the famous navy salvage boat that had raised the submarine S-51 under the leadership of Commander Edward Ellsburg in 1925, and worked as a dive and survey boat for thirty years, put me on the track leading to the Akron’s grave. The logbook gave the coordinates where Falcon moored. Her position was reasonably close to the main debris field that was twenty-seven miles offshore from Beach Haven, New Jersey.
The volunteer NUMA team assembled in Beach Haven in July of 1986. Most came from Long Island, New York. A1 and Laura Ecke came with their thirty-four-foot boat. Dr. Ken Kamler acted as team physician and diver, along with Mike Duffy, a seasoned oceanographer. Zeff and Peggy Loria also came along to lend a hand, set up logistics, and run things when I had to go home a day early to begin a book tour. My good old pal, dependable Bill Shea, who suffered the seasickness of the damned on our voyages around the North Sea, also came along.
We gathered at a motel on the beach, a short drive from the marina where the Eckes’ boat was docked. The lady at the desk stood nearly six feet tall, her blond hair pulled back into a tight bun. She stared at me through steely piercing eyes that I swore were focusing on a calendar hanging on the wall directly behind my head.
“Ja, vas du you vant?”
I should have known I was in for it. She had the face of the town rat catcher.
“I have a reservation. My name is Cussler.”
She snapped open a ledgerlike book with razor precision and perused the names. “Ja, Cussler, a good German name. You will fill out the register.”
I signed.
“Your credit card.” It was a demand, not a request.
She made an imprint and handed back the card, but not before biting one corner as if it were a counterfeit coin. “Now the orders.”
I looked at her. “Orders?”
“You will not drink alcohol in your room. You will have no parties in your room. You will not bring animals into your room. You will not smoke in your room. You will not make loud sounds or play loud music in your room. You will not eat in your room.”
“Can I watch TV in my room?”
“Twenty-five cents for ten minutes. There is a slot next to the power button.”
“Can I use the bathroom?” I said, in a pathetic attempt to beleaguer her.
“If you are hygienically neat.”
“But can I sleep in the bed?”
A dark scowl crossed her face as she caught on. “If you do not adhere to the orders, you will have to stay somewhere else.”
“My friends are here.”
“That’s your problem.”
I couldn’t resist one more. “What time do we fall out in formation for roll call?”
“Here is your key. Room 27.”
“That’s upstairs,” I complained. “I’d prefer a room on ground level.”
“We do not play musical chairs,” she said, her hostility rising.
I could see it was a lost cause, so I picked up my luggage and hiked up the stairs. The room was dark when I entered. Hanging over the bed was a print of a man standing behind a desk. I walked closer, thinking he might have a spit curl over one eye and a clipped broom mustache.
But, no, it was Elvis Presley. I’d never seen a picture of him standing behind a desk before.
I unpacked and met the rest of the gang at di
An unforeseen problem was Ecke’s boat. Though a nice and comfortable craft for short day trips, it had only one engine. If it faltered in a gale, forget it.
Stormy weather or not, since I was a California beach bum and enjoyed body surfing, I put on my swim trunks and headed to the beach, thinking the storm might kick up some good waves. Never having surfed the East Coast, I was stu
At last, after we enjoyed the preeminent lifestyle of Beach Haven in the rain for three days, the sun appeared, and our jolly band of sea hunters set sail from the dock at Little Egg Harbor and cruised out to sea. With only one engine, the boat drove through the waves with the sensation of a hacksaw cutting marble. It took us four hours to run the twenty-seven miles to our search grid.
The instant we arrived, Captain Ecke peered at some dark clouds on the eastern horizon and proclaimed, “We have to return to port. There’s a storm coming.”
“Storm, hell!” I protested. “We just got here.”
I argued, pleaded, and begged, finally cajoling him into remaining on station. The storm, as I predicted, continued north and we had calm seas for the search. The sidescan sonar went out and we began ru
With a four-hour trip back to port staring us in the face, I called it quits for the day. We pulled up anchor and chugged home. Later, before we all headed out to a seafood restaurant for di
When I called Harold on the error, he became indignant and shrugged his shoulders, as if the entire wasted day were a voyage down the lazy river in the noonday sun. Since he was supplying the boat, I bit my tongue and slinked off to the restaurant, wondering about the meaning of life.
The weather looked good the next morning, so we tried again. Déjà vu. We had no sooner arrived at the search grid than Harold swept his hand toward another front of storm clouds and turned the boat back to shore. These flights of fancy were begi
We sailed into the Beach Haven Cha