Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  Thus, what follows is a hybrid, a combined tale of sometimes competing perspectives. Only two men, Houtz and Kirkwood, really know what happened atop Cortes Bank, and Kirkwood, it seems, is no longer around to counter Houtz’s differing recollections.

  In 1952, Joe “Palooka” Kirkwood Jr., one of the originators of the idea of sinking the SS Jalisco atop Cortes Bank’s Bishop Rock to create the nation of Abalonia, was at the top of his game. He was a well-paid actor and Masters-caliber golfer who had been invited to play in the Azalea Open golf tournament, in Wilmington, North Carolina. Upon learning that Kirkwood’s wife, Cathy Downs, was in town, organizers of the concurrent Azalea Festival offered Downs the annual Azalea Queen crown. In a remarkable coincidence, one of North Carolina’s most prolific and renowned photographers, Hugh MacRae Morton, captured Kirkwood with his arms around Downs during coronation of the festival’s Azalea Princess (princess’s identity unknown). MacRae Morton was the great-great nephew of Bishop Rock’s discoverer, Archibald MacRae. Photo: The North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina.

  Shortly after his meeting with Kirkwood, Houtz learned of the other principals in the operation. Tony Aleman was the son of a former Mexican president. Robert Lynch was the president of a savings and loan. Bruce McMahan, the heir to a chain of furniture stores, owned a fleet of abalone boats and a rock quarry in Ensenada. When it came time for the men to name their new nation, Kirkwood liked the ring of “Lemuria,” after a long-rumored lost continent of the Pacific said to have disappeared in a cataclysm thirteen thousand years ago. For some reason, though, the media latched onto the name “Abalonia,” and this was the name that stuck.

  Kirkwood’s idea was simple. Dump enough of McMahan’s boulders atop Bishop Rock and then sink a rock-filled barge atop that pile of rocks to return Cortes Bank to its previous life as an island. This would allow the Abalonians to plant a flag and establish a “monument,” something akin to a mining claim, atop a shoal that, despite a U.S.-maintained warning buoy, clearly lay in international waters. The monument would quickly be surrounded with a growing donut of Mexican boulders and filled with a jelly center concocted of LA’s landfill rubbish. Houtz met McMahan at a Tijuana watering hole to discuss how best to barge his rocks a hundred miles out to sea. “He was a little older than me—thirty-three, thirty-four. He seemed like kind of a spoiled kid. Nice enough, though. Where we met, they all knew him. All the chickees—everyone was around him.”

  Hours of brainstorming eventually led Houtz to a brilliant, seemingly simpler plan. Rather than scuttling a low-lying barge, it would be far easier to buy a big old ship, scuttle her on a level, shallow stretch of seafloor right around her actual waterline, and immediately surround her with rocks. Were the ship high enough out of the water to be inhabitable, her owners would create a more legally defensible “monument,” along with a revenue-producing seafood factory from the get-go.

  Eventually, with enough of McMahan’s boulders and LA’s trash, you could conceivably end up with a glittering seven-mile-long, three-mile-wide island resort atop the shoal’s mesa-like reaches.

  Kirkwood loved Houtz’s idea. Heaven knows what the Kinkipar would have made of it.

  Jim Houtz quickly found that the existing nautical charts created through the years seemed to record slightly different depths for Bishop Rock—perhaps lending some credence to Flippy Hoffman’s rumor that it had once been dynamited. There were also simply too many gaps in the charts for a detailed picture of the bottom. Houtz would need to spend considerable time atop Bishop Rock—watching wind, waves, currents, and most of all, diving. By spring of 1966, he was making regular forays aboard his forty-three-foot, twin-engine sportfisher Rainbow’s End.

  During these trips, Houtz felt he witnessed nearly every sea the Cortes Bank was capable of dishing out—from swimming pool calm to blitzing winds and seas. He watched sizable waves crash above Bishop Rock, but nothing that might not be mitigated with a truly massive breakwater. He likened the approaching waves to a rolling barrel. The water actually only moves up and down while the barrel rolls. The key, then, was to shatter that barrel with McMahan’s boulders.

  The best spot to lay a ship seemed to be off the southwestern edge of Bishop Rock’s two-and-a-half-fathom peak, about a third of a mile northwest of the buoy. There, the shallow ridgeline would have already dissipated considerable swell energy. The seafloor dropped precipitously off an adjacent ledge where fishing boats might make a safe approach to the ship’s stern to offload fish, lobster, and abalone.

  “We had a flat bottom—a beautiful bottom,” said Houtz. “And it was sandy. We’d dig up these cockles—clams—eight, nine inches. Huge, absolutely enormous. Good God, did they make good chowder.”

  They found their ship—the one they would scuttle—in San Francisco. SS Jalisco was a mighty unusual vessel—the product of two facts of life during the years surrounding the great wars. First, the United States had an inexhaustible need for freighters. Second, steel was scarce, while concrete was relatively plentiful. The concept, then, was to create a ship-shaped lattice of steel rebar and surround it with a tough concrete called ferro-cement. The first of these concrete “Liberty” ships were rustproof, but slow, heavy, and fragile. In 1920, the concrete Cape Fear collided with the City of Atlanta at Narragansett Bay. She “shattered as if a teacup was hit,” according to Rob Bender of the Web site Concreteships.org, sinking in three minutes and taking nineteen crewmen.

  The SS Richard Lewis Humphrey was one of twenty-four identical concrete ships rushed into service during World War II. Each of these so-called McCloskey ships was 334 feet long and weighed five thousand tons. Humphrey reportedly carried a load of coffee to the Pacific Coast before being damaged in a storm and sold to Mexico for scrap. It seems evident that someone in Mexico instead rechristened her Jalisco , and she continued to ply the Pacific until sometime in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Houtz found her collecting rust and dust among the mothball fleet in Oakland’s naval shipyard.

  For eighty thousand dollars, the Abalonians purchased this serviceable vessel with a flat bottom and twenty-seven feet of elevation between her waterline and main deck. Her price included a workroom filled with industrial-grade metal and woodworking tools and a discount for salvage removal of her main engine, turbines, and other sundry parts. She would draw far less than her normal twenty-six feet with her weighty running gear removed, and would have to be towed down from San Francisco behind a tug. Houtz calculated that after scuttling, her lowest stretch of hull would be better than twenty feet above the high-tide waterline at Cortes Bank. This was good, for it meant she’d make for an immediately dry and habitable Abalonia.

  As Kirkwood was handling most of the sale itself, Houtz gave him his list of requirements: The two forward holds must be insulated for seafood freezing and refrigeration. Two auxiliary turbine generators, 50,000 and 250,000 watts, and two boilers were to be fueled and online. And both massive anchors, their 750 feet of chain, and the diesel engine that drove the air compressor for their winches must be operational.

  The sole issue that caused Houtz pause was Jalisco’s meager array of four ballast pipes—each only four inches in diameter. The ship needed to fill with water and settle to the bottom quickly, and these would not do the job. Houtz said, “Kirkwood told me, ‘I’ll add more valves.’ I said, ‘Fine.’ I left all that stuff up to him.”

  Houtz knew leaving such important nautical requirements to an admitted landlubber might be a mistake, but he was too damned busy running his dive shop and worrying about logistics. He decided that the best chance for success would come in having Rainbow’s End lay out a “runway” of buoys to direct Jalisco along and just to the north of Bishop Rock’s shallow ridgeline. Once in position, Houtz would lock her into a precise position along his runway by letting her drift backward in the southerly current and playing out her anchor chains. Ballast valves would open and Jalisco would settle forever in thirty-two feet of water. A veritable conveyor belt of McMahan�
��s boulders would quickly surround her.

  Kirkwood tried repeatedly to take official channels to obtain some sort of blessing or approval from the United States for his island, but he was met by head scratching at the various agencies he queried. No one returned his calls. “Some people began to kid me, calling me ‘King Joseph’ or ‘King Kirkwood,’” he wrote. “As a gag a friend handed me a fistful of rocks to ‘help you build your kingdom.’”

  As November arrived, Kirkwood’s plans had become newspaper fodder, and they drew the attention of the city of San Diego, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Attorney Edwin Miller. There were valid concerns. What if Kirkwood was a communist sympathizer? What if the Abalonians decided to restrict fishermen in their newly claimed territorial waters? What if LA’s garbage started washing ashore? What if the mafia wanted the island for a casino? Kirkwood claimed to have already refused such an offer.

  Kirkwood became impatient, and then frantic, waiting for answers to questions that never came and fearful that the U.S. attorney or someone else in the government would order him to cease and desist. He phoned Houtz at the start of the second week of November. How was Rainbow’s End? How was the weather? McMahan’s rocks were ready. Jalisco was ready. It was time for action.

  Houtz had just dropped a brand-new pair of Chrysler Hemi V8 engines into Rainbow’s End. They needed at least fifty hours of break-in time before a long trip out to the Bank. But Kirkwood wanted to get this going now. Houtz studied the weather. A gale had wound up and pulled out to sea off Japan, but its wind and rain were many days out. His best guess was that the storm would track to the north, leaving a strong dome of calm high pressure anchored over Southern California. He reluctantly granted Kirkwood’s request.

  The team assembled at the Balboa Bay Club on the afternoon of Sunday, November 13, 1966. Kirkwood arrived regally clad: pleated khaki trousers, a nice sweater Houtz suspected was cashmere, and a pair of fur après-ski boots, which Kirkwood thought might keep his feet warm. Houtz clucks at the memory of the boots, their image permanently seared into his brain. “Everybody at the club had been looking at the boots and looking at me, and asking, who is this guy?”

  The royal entourage included Houtz’s navigator, a man whose name he has forgotten, and a fellow diver and employee he today only remembers as “Dan.” Kirkwood brought along a pair of young men Houtz had never met—William “Many Horses” Lesslie, a short, muscular man of Native American descent, and a young assistant named John O’Malley.

  With the King of Abalonia safely aboard, Houtz slid the throttles forward on the Rainbow’s End and set a course for Cortes Bank. Somewhere off Catalina Island, an agitated Kirkwood asked Houtz to speed up. Houtz refused, saying, “Joe, look, we set up a plan…You know the exact RPMs of the engine and the speed of the boat. That’s how you know where you’re going.” As Houtz explained later, “It had been made clear on an earlier trip—this is my boat. I’m the captain. Stay out of the way.”

  An hour or so later, one engine emitted an earsplitting clatter. A flabbergasted Houtz ordered it shut down. He wanted to yell I told you so to Kirkwood, but bit his lip. The decision to make the run had, after all, been his. They would continue on minus an engine.

  Houtz wondered why Kirkwood was in such a hurry, not realizing that a race between Kirkwood and the U.S. attorney had already commenced.

  Rainbow’s End reached Bishop Rock just after dawn on Monday morning. The weather was a California dream, the water as calm as a pond. Houtz took a bearing on the Bishop Rock buoy and located the spot for the first of his orange markers. “Everything was already charted,” he said to me. “We had the lengths of line attached to the buoys with all the weights. All we had to do was drop one, stay on course, drop two, stay on course, drop three, stay on course.”

  A call came from the tug E. Whitney Olsen, which was hauling the Jalisco down from San Francisco. They would be visible on the horizon soon. Shortly thereafter, Bruce McMahan would reach Bishop Rock from San Diego aboard a sportfisher, the Polaris II. His boulder armada should arrive from Ensenada on Tuesday morning.

  As Houtz laid the markers, the Whitney Olsen loomed off to the north, dwarfed by the silhouette of the Jalisco . She was a grand and eerie sight. Her hull was slate gray, but long rusty streaks ran down beneath patches where her rebar bones had been exposed—looking for all the world like dried blood. Toward sunset, Kirkwood joined McMahan aboard Polaris while Houtz remained aboard Rainbow’s End. By nightfall, the Whitney Olsen and Jalisco would begin making the first of many broad, idle-speed circles well to the west of the Bishop Rock buoy.

  Back on the mainland, the proceedings were being eyed closely by San Diego Union Tribune reporters, who possessed a radio telephone and a private channel to Bruce McMahan aboard Polaris. “People thought we were just kidding,” McMahan had told them. “If all goes well, we should be starting operations out there in a couple of weeks.”

  Jim Houtz claims he doesn’t know when the call came in, but at some point around dinnertime, a radio telephone conversation took place between U.S. Attorney Edwin Miller, Whitney Olsen Captain Cliff Miller, Kirkwood, and McMahan. The message was blunt. The Abalonians were on the U.S. continental shelf, they were in violation of U.S. federal laws, and they were to cease all operations. Captain Miller was to await further instruction. Kirkwood wrote, “I gave Captain Miller the information to relay to the U.S. attorney regarding the people we were in contact with in Washington, and sat back to wait, chewing on my lip.”

  In about an hour, the U.S. attorney called back demanding the ship be towed to San Diego. “He then said we were in violation of U.S. laws because we were a hazard to shipping,” wrote Kirkwood. “He commenced reading the law to us, but his voice seemed to falter as he said the words, ‘misdemeanor, punishable by $50.00 fine.’”

  As Kirkwood recorded, “The captain, incredulous at the thought that we were a hazard to shipping, asked, ‘On Bishop Rock?’”

  Attorney Miller shouted back angrily, “Do you understand me, captain! Tow that boat back or I’ll have your license!”

  “I thought I had anticipated every angle,” Kirkwood wrote. “But this was so illogical, I had considered it briefly and dismissed it from my mind months ago. We were on Bishop Rock, itself a great hazard to shipping, to which all the boats that had gone down there were testimony, but it was well protected by buoys put there by the United States and plainly marked on every map in existence. For that matter, I just couldn’t see how the U.S. could have jurisdiction. But I had gambled and been fully aware of the risks. I tried to stifle the resentment I felt for the U.S. attorney and told myself he was just doing his job. He had only cited us with a misdemeanor. I could just ignore it, go ahead with the project, and pay my fines, but that would still be against the law, and that wasn’t the way I wanted to do this.”

  But Houtz said that’s not how it went down.

  Houtz thinks a conversation then took place between Kirkwood, McMahan, and Captain Miller. U.S. attorney be damned, they were going to scuttle the Jalisco . But the right story had to be told. What if they claimed that Whitney Olsen accidentally scraped Jalisco across an uncharted portion of Bishop Rock after Attorney Miller’s call, and she started taking on water? It would be impossible to tow a sinking ship to San Diego, so to avoid creating a new shipping hazard, they could claim they decided to sink it atop an existing shipping hazard, which conveniently lay right along Jim Houtz’s runway. Captain Miller could keep his license, and the founding fathers could cry forgiveness, not ask permission, collect on a $45,000 insurance policy (or at least have the ship above the water so she could be salvaged), avoid criminal prosecution and a fifty-dollar fine, and still potentially witness the birth of their nation.

  It was a brilliant plan. One that, Jim Houtz said, Kirkwood had clearly decided he wasn’t going to share with Houtz. Because if Houtz balked and went along with the U.S. attorney—which he would have—Abalonia would never rise from the deep.

  Joe Kirkwood
and the captain of the Whitney Olsen would indeed claim that Jalisco struck the Bishop Rock sometime Monday night and began taking on water. Yet both Jim Houtz and Whitney Olsen crewman Louis Ribeiro, whom I interviewed recently in San Diego, insist that as dawn broke on Tuesday morning, a perfectly sound old ship stood ready to become an island.

  From Rainbow’s End, Houtz asked Clifford Miller to tow the Jalisco into position. She steamed in from some distance off Bishop Rock and lined up with the buoy runway. By 9:15 A.M. , all was well.

  The men marveled as the spooky old ship slid silently past Rainbow’s End. Houtz pondered the origin of a round hole that had been punched in her forward gunwale—a nasty, toothy little wound about two feet around and lined with crumbling cement and twisted, rusty rebar. A lengthier section along her forward starboard bow had also shattered. She really was rotting to her bones.

  Houtz planned to live aboard the ghost ship for the next few weeks. He grabbed a bag of supplies, a .270-caliber bolt action rifle (should he need to defend their island), and a life jacket, and he had his mate bring the Rainbow’s End alongside the Jalisco . As best as Houtz can remember, Dan, Kirkwood, William Lesslie, and John O’Malley joined him in clambering aboard, ferrying life jackets and other supplies. Spirits were high.

  It was at this point that Houtz first noted an odd sensation. The horizon was making a ponderously slow seesaw. Jalisco was undulating atop a very long, low, and pillow-soft swell that was approaching from her bow. I asked Houtz exactly how long, and he gave a whistle. “Long,” he said. “The distance from trough to crest was tremendous.”

  Houtz had not seen swells like this out here, but he had also never stood right above Bishop Rock on a big ship. The swells weren’t very big—two, maybe four feet. He and Dan discussed them briefly but shrugged and attributed the anomaly to conditions right atop the rock. “It’s been dead calm,” he told me. “So what if we get a little wind and the normal seas. I mean, this is a freighter. Big deal.”