After they put on their dive gear, Dirk checked the anchor to be sure it was snug on the bottom and wouldn't break loose and allow the boat to drift away. Not that it would go far in the harbor. Without the need for wet suits to protect their bodies from cold water temperatures or sharp coral, they went over the side in ten feet of water in only their bathing suits. The water was almost as clear as glass. Visibility was nearly two hundred feet, the temperature warm in the middle eighties, perfect diving conditions.
Forty minutes later, Dirk climbed up the boarding ladder to the deck and removed his air tank and weight belt. He had run a metal probe beneath the surface of the sand, checking for a harder clay layer beneath but found fifteen feet of soft sand before striking bedrock. He sat there for a few minutes, watching Summer's air bubbles travel around the boat. Soon, she was climbing aboard and paused on the boarding ladder to carefully set a coral-encrusted object on the deck. Then she stood with water trickling down her body onto the teak deck as she slipped out of her dive gear.
"What have you got?" asked Dirk.
"I don't know, but it feels too heavy for a rock. I found it a hundred yards offshore, protruding out of the sand."
Dirk scanned the shoreline, still seemingly deserted. He had a strange feeling in the pit of his stomach, as if they were being watched.
He picked up the
object and gently chipped away the encrustation with his dive knife. Soon the object took on the look of a bird with outstretched wings.
"Looks like an eagle or swan," he said. Then the tip of his knife cut a small scratch that showed silver. "The reason it's heavy is because it's cast out of lead."
Summer took it in her hands and stared at the wings and the beaked head that was turned to the right. "Could it be ancient Celt?"
"The fact that it's sculpted out of lead is a good sign. Dr. Chisholm told me that, besides tin, one of the main attractions of Cornwall was its lead mines. Did you mark the site where you found it?"
She nodded. "I left my probe in the sand with a little orange flag on it."
"How far out?"
"About fifty feet in that direction," she said, pointing.
"Okay, before we dredge or probe with the water jet, we'll run over your site with the metal detector. The side-scan sonar won't be of much use if all the ship wreckage is buried."
"Maybe we should have had Rudi send a magnetometer."
Dirk smiled. "A magnetometer detects the magnetic field of iron or steel. Odysseus sailed long before the Iron Age appeared. A metal detector will read iron besides most other metals, including gold and bronze."
Summer turned on the Fisher Pulse 10 detector as Dirk connected the cable from the meter and audio readouts to the tow fish encasing the sensor. Then he lowered the tow fish over the side, leaving just enough cable so that it wouldn't drag on the bottom at slow surveying speed. His final task was to raise the anchor.
"Ready?" he asked.
"All set," answered Summer.
Turning over the diesel engine, Dirk began making closely spaced survey lines over the target area, mowing the lawn until they struck an anomaly. After only fifteen minutes, the needle on the meter began to zig and zag in unison with an increased buzzing sound over Summer's earphones.
"We're coming up on something," she announced.
Then came a slight zip in sound and a brief swing of the needle as they passed over Summer's metal probe that was sticking out of the bottom.
"Get a good reading?" asked Dirk.
Summer was about to answer in the negative when the needle began wildly sweeping back and forth, indicating a metallic object or objects passing under the keel. "We have a pretty good mass down there. What direction are we running?"
"East to west," replied Dirk, marking the target coordinates from his global positioning instrument.
"Run over the site again, but this time from north to south."
Dirk did as he was told, passing beyond the target for a hundred yards before swinging Dear Heart on a ninety-degree turn heading north to south. Again the meter and audio sound went wild. Summer penciled the meter readings in a notebook and looked up at Dirk standing at the wheel.
"The target is linear, about fifty feet in length with a broad dipolar signature. It looks to have a minimal but dispersed mass, similar to what you'd expect from a broken-up sailing vessel."
"It seems to be in the expected range of an old wreck. We'd better check it out."
"How deep is the water?"