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Reports written by Susan
Wels
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Images produced by Matt Tulloch | |||
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Sunday, August 9, 1998
"Soon, it was all silent....we were drifting in the boats until dawn."
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 Now
it’s a waiting game. Five lift bags filled with lighter-than-water
diesel fuel have already been attached to the Big Piece—enough, theoretically,
to lift it. So far, the huge section of the Titanic’s hull plating
has shifted into a more vertical position, but it still seems to be stuck
11,000 feet down on the bottom."It may come up today, it may come up tomorrow, shrugs Pierre Valdy, the expedition’s mission chief. In case it does appear this afternoon, a dozen of us have staked out positions on the top deck of the Nadir, where we have an unobstructed 360-degree view of the Atlantic. It’s a calm, almost windless day, and we’re all keeping our eyes out for an orange lift bag in the miles and miles of open sea. |
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 After
an hour and a half, though, most of us give up and head indoors. Pierre
Valdy figures that suction is keeping the Big Piece on the bottom, and
he’s decided to add a sixth lift bag in the morning. "We didn’t
use all our lifting power right away," he explains, "because
we didn’t want the Big Piece to go up like a rocket."Now, we’re all waiting to hear from marine architect David Livingstone, who went down in Nautile this morning for a close-up inspection of the piece. At 4:45 p.m., the sub returns, and David climbs slowly out of the hatch onto Nadir. The area of the ocean bottom where the Big Piece sits, he reports, is full of steep cliffs and ravines. Parts of the seabed are as barren as a desert, while other areas look like hillsides blooming with sponges and other sea life. |
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 "The
piece," he tells us, "is sitting vertically in the sediment. It
appears to have suffered no damage at all in the past two years, and it
looks superb. It’s covered with the most marvelous shapes and colors,
and all but one of the porthole windows are intact. The reflections in the
glass," he adds, "are quite amazing."
Still, David admits, it was a big disappointment to him that the Big Piece didn’t begin to rise during his dive. We may all have to wait until tomorrow. |
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