Every day we would leave Sausalito to go out through the Golden Gate
and head out to the Farallones to do our work
in usually beautiful
weather
that belies the fact that this is an area that
took ships sometimes
not only without warning but without notice.
You head out there over a spot where down below in the depths lies a shipwreck.
You launch. You wait. You anticipate. You watch what comes back through the feed
from the robot on the bottom. Things begin to appear. You begin to better understand
what you're seeing, what it represents. Then you see something like this gun...
which very powerfully tells a story because it's an artifact that
has particular importance. It's there. It shows in historic photographs
and you see it on the bottom encrusted and changed and yet in your mind's eye, or when
you come back and look at historic photograph, there it is... painted with a
group of smiling young men around it and it reminds you that what you're looking at
was once not only in the land of air and light, but a living ship with a living crew.
You come away with
a profound sense that what you're doing, what you see, what you now must share is not
just the story of a ship, not just the story of an expedition. There are 56 guys
whose story needs to be told and whose families need to know where they are.
And the fact that they are now
not only resting in their ship at bottom of the ocean, but in an area of
the country that is set aside as a National Marine Sanctuary.