Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  CHAPTER 1

  1. Recollections came through a few years of in-person conversations with Bill Sharp and Sam George, and telephone interviews with Bill, Sam, and George Hulse in 2010.

  2. Background on Larry “Flame” Moore came from Sharp, Sam George, Mike Parsons, and Sean Collins; from interviews with his wife Candace during October 2009; and a lengthy but unpublished interview Sharp conducted with Flame shortly after the 2001 mission to Cortes Bank. I had only one occasion to meet Flame, when I went to the Surfing offices to pick up a photograph for use on Surfermag.com in 1998. He was friendly, energetic, and very explicit over the photo’s care and feeding.

  3. I interviewed Philip “Flippy” Hoffman by telephone in August 2009. I had hoped to talk in person about the rogue wave described by Flippy’s great-nephew Nathan Fletcher, but unfortunately, Flippy passed away at the age of eighty, on November 15, 2010. I have been unable to confirm his recollection that the navy once blew the top off Bishop Rock.

  4. The collision of the USS Enterprise was briefly described in “Nuclear Carrier Enterprise Hits Reef Off San Diego,” Los Angeles Times, November 4, 1985.

  5. Nick Carroll, ed., 30 Years of Flame—California’s Legendary Surf Photographer (San Clemente, California: Surfing Magazine, 2005). Carroll’s excellent book was immeasurably helpful in painting a picture of Flame’s life.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. The spark for this chapter was lit by intriguing interviews with Dr. Rikk Kvitek, director of the Seafloor Mapping Division at California State University, Monterey Bay, and his colleague Dr. Gary Greene. I should also note the assistance of NOAA fisheries biologist John Butler in relaying the gloomy state of the Bank’s abalone fishery.

  Kvitek’s mapping mission to the Bank was a typically wild ride. First, his remote-operated camera was ensnared in the propeller of their research vessel. “Then at 2 A.M. , all the data stopped coming onto our screen,” he said. “And sparks and flames started shooting out of the smokestack—we had a flue fire. Then I looked off the side and saw the thickest school of mackerel I’ve ever seen in my life—millions and millions thrashing everywhere. I went to pull up the sonar but it had been snapped off. That’s why we don’t have the best data set. We ran into this feeding frenzy and the best indication is that the sonar clipped a feeding whale.

  ”

  Kvitek’s hypersensitive sonar thus fired blanks along portions of Cortes’s shoalest waters, but he was still troubled and amazed at his scans. First, largely illegal commercial overfishing has nearly eradicated the Bank’s abalone. Then there was the strange seafloor. At Tanner Bank, Kvitek imagined a lagoon, 250 or so feet deep, ringed with low rock hills, where canoe-bound Native Americans once hurled spears and cast nets. “Then what you see at Cortes are old, historic shorelines,” he said.

  Dr. Greene said that Cortes and Tanner were heaved to the surface by tectonically tortured basalts in a process that may be ongoing. At Bishop Rock and Cortes’s nine-fathom shoal, softer sandstone has been scoured away to reveal a hard, black basaltic heart—a formation called a “buried hill.” “These are volcanic rocks, twenty million years old,” said Greene. “They’re relatively young in geologic time, and they’re exotic in that we’re not sure exactly where they came from.”

  2. The following sources were also invaluable:

  A. Chuck Graham, “Chumash Tumol Makes 22-Mile Crossing,” Canoe and Kayak Magazine Web exclusive (http://www.canoekayak.com/canoe/tomolcrossingchanelislands).

  B. Roberta Reyes Cordero, “Our Ancestors’ Gift Across Time: A Story of Indigenous Maritime Culture Resurgence,” News from Native California 11, no. 3 (Spring 1998): (http://channelislands.noaa.gov/drop_down/chumash.html).

  C. Charles Frederick Holder and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, The Channel Islands of California: A Book for the Angler, Sportsman, and Tourist (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1910). The above book also refers to Fray Geronimo de Zarate Salmeron, Relaciones: An Account of Things Seen and Learned by Father Jeronimo de Zarate Salmeron from the Year 1538 to Year 1626, trans. by Alicia Ronstadt Milich (Albuquerque: Horn & Wallace Publishers, reprinted, 1966).

  D. L. Mark Raab, Jim Cassidy, and Andrew Yatsko, California Maritime Archaeology: A San Clemente Island Perspective (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press, 2009).

  E. J. E. Holzman, “The Submarine Geology of Cortes and Tanner Banks,” Journal of Sedimentary Research 22 (1952).

  F. Reports published in the Pacific Coast Archaeological Society Quarterly. Most are available on their Web site, www.pcas.org. The following were especially fascinating:

  (1) Paul Porcasi, Judith Porcasi, and Collin O’Neill, “Early Holocene Coastlines of the California Bight,” vol. 35, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 1999).

  (2) Andrew Yatsko, “Of Marine Terraces and Sand Dunes: The Landscape of San Clemente Island,” vol. 36, no. 1 (Winter 2000).

  (3) Ellen T. Hardy, “Religious Aspects of the Material Remains from San Clemente Island,” ibid.

  (4) Clement W. Meighan, “Overview of the Archaeology of San Clemente Island, California,” ibid.

  (5) Roy A. Salis, “The Prehistoric Fishery of San Clemente Island,” vol. 36, nos. 1 and 2 (Winter and Spring 2000).

  (6) Michele D. Titus and Phillip L. Walker, “Skeletal Remains from San Clemente Island,” vol. 36, no. 2 (Spring 2000).

  G. I also conducted telephone interviews with Paul and Judith Porcasi and Andrew Yatsko. The Porcasis alerted me to the existence of pygmy mammoths and Chendytes lawi, the great flightless duck. Yatsko pointed out that the Kinkipar might have gone to Cortes and Tanner Islands to hunt during strong El Niño events—whose warm water can decimate local fish and mammal populations. “They were well maritime adapted,” he said. “The notion of people on those outer islands during the early Holocene period is not at all out of line.” Yatsko also pointed out that “Gabriellino (natives to San Clemente and other islands) culture declined so quickly after European contact that it remains little more than a cipher to anthropologists.”

  H. Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell (New York, Yearling. First edition, 1961, reprinted, 1987) is a fascinating, fictionalized account of the legendary “Lost Woman” of San Nicolas Island and a must-read for anyone with an interest in the last days of California’s island Indian culture.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. The reference to the Santa Rosa shipwreck is provided on the first page of the appendix of the 1981 edition of Ship wrecks of the Pacific Coast by James A. Gibbs (Hillsboro, Oregon: Binford and Mort, 1981). Interestingly, the first printing of this book (1957) makes no such mention. Perhaps Gibbs relied on Mel Fisher’s 1957 determination of the ship’s location.

  2. From John Potter, The Treasure Diver’s Guide (Hobe Sound, Florida: Florida Classics Library, 1988): “There are several published accounts that a Spanish galleon, carrying some gold, sank at the outer point of Cortez Bank in 1717. This ship was reported to have struck a 15-foot deep shoal now called Bishop’s Rock…”

  3. Logs and insight from the Constitution were provided by a Rebecca Parmer, an archivist with the USS Constitution Museum in Philadelphia.

  4. The writings of James Alden and fellow Coast Surveyors like Archibald MacRae are published in lengthy annual books titled Report to the Superintendent of the Coast Survey Showing the Progress of the Survey During the Year 18__. These books were digitized by NOAA as images (http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/cgs/data_rescue_cgs_annual_reports.html). The 1855 report contains Archibald MacRae’s discovery of what would become known as Bishop Rock. The finding was reported in “Dangerous Rock on the Coast of California,” New York Times, November 3, 1855.

  5. I became aware of MacRae’s death when reading the Coast Survey report of 1856, when Alden wrote of “the untimely death of that intelligent and energetic officer.” NOAA historian Albert “Skip” Theberge confirmed it a suicide and suggested I read the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Mains’l Haul, the journal of the Maritime Museum of San Diego. The issue is devoted to the journal of Coast Surveyor P
hilip C. Johnson, who served briefly under MacRae on what it seems was MacRae’s second journey to Cortes Bank (I cannot definitively state that MacRae went to Cortes twice, only that reports seem to indicate so). On November 18, 1855, Johnson wrote, “Lieutenant MacRae committed suicide by blowing his brains out in the cabin of the Ewing. He was buried in cemetery on the 19th.” Further queries revealed that MacRae was a member of Wilmington, North Carolina’s most prominent family. (His great, great, great nephew Hugh MacRae Jr. is today an avid surfer). Eric Kozen, caretaker of Wilmington’s Oakdale cemetery showed me his gravesite. (If MacRae’s indeed buried there, he was pickled in whiskey and shipped home). Beverly Tetterton, special collections librarian at the New Hanover Public Library in Wilmington, made me aware of MacRae’s letters at Duke University. At Duke, research librarian Arthur “Mitch” Fraas provided inestimable help in locating and sifting through some four thousand pages of MacRae family documents. Google revealed MacRae’s lengthy account of his days in Chile in The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere During the Years 1849–’50–’51–’52. MacRae’s writings reveal a fiercely intelligent and witty raconteur, and are ultimately heartbreaking. They include the following:

  In the Andes: I have rarely passed so uncomfortable a night, nor one, at the same time, more impressive. My face and hands were blistered by the sun and chapped by the cold winds to such an extent as to produce fever, and I found it impossible to sleep…We made our fires at nightfall with mules’ dung—the best fuel to be had; and as the wind was strong in squalls, our stew was pretty well seasoned with the ashes. These, however, are things to which one becomes accustomed…

  Letter home from Santiago: “Sue” asked my opinion as to whether a fan she had was large enough to go to a ball with. On examining it, I discovered that it was a little broke, and pretending to think that I had broken it, I insisted on carrying it and having it repaired. To this, she consented and accordingly I carried it off. But instead of having it fixed, I bought a new one which cost me three dollars and sent it—as a reason that I could find no one to repair the other. A few nights after being there alone, Susan thanked me one night with such a sweet confession, showing at the same time a gentlemen’s ring which had not even the jewelers mark off it, that I felt most infernally spooney (author’s note: enamored in a silly, or sentimental way) but withal a little scared. I had an idea that ring was destined for me and knew that if it were once given, all would be over as far as my will was concerned…

  6. MacRae’s delivering news of the Mexican-American War was recounted on page 287 in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California, 1884-90 by Hubert Howe Bancroft (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007). Former New Jersey Governor Rodman M. Price, who served under MacRae aboard Cyane, also recounts MacRae’s work as a spy.

  7. The claiming of Bishop Rock by the United States by Commander William Adger Moffett appeared in “We Get More Territory,” The New York Times, October 16, 1911.

  8. The timeline of the SS Bishop and numerous articles that would question the Bishop’s Cortes Bank collision would have been impossible to find without diver and treasure hunter Steve Lawson, whose discoveries included archival stories from the Daily Alta, The New York Times, and “About a Rock—and a Bishop,” Mains’l Haul 5, no. 2 (1966). To learn more about Lawson, read Lost Below: The Southwest’s Most Intriguing Shipwrecks, Sunken Aircraft, Submerged Ruins and Undersea Treasures by David Finnern (Pearl Publishing, Monterey, 2009).

  9. Another source of Coast Survey lore who paints a vivid picture belowdecks is writer Kenneth Lifshitz, who has been penning a novel based on James Alden, George Davidson, and the Coast Survey he calls Monoville. He’s looking for a publisher.

  10. Early twentieth century encounters included Maude Pilkington Lukens, “Road Mapping Our Sea Coast,” Los Angeles Times, February 22, 1925; George Wycherly Kirkman, “The Lost Islands,” Los Angeles Times, October 24, 1926.

  11. The El Capitan collision: “12 Fishermen Saved as Two Boats Collide,” Long Beach Press-Telegram, November 18, 1952.

  12. I interviewed Mel Fisher in around 1989 as an eager young writer for a Myrtle Beach weekly called Hot Times, at small museum where you could see booty from the Atocha. Other Fisher stories included: Lee Bastajian, “Divers Will Hunt Undersea Fortune,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 1956; George Beronius, “Sunken Treasure! Shout Lures 23 on Sea Search,” Los Angeles Times, January 14, 1957; and Eugene Lyon, “Atocha Tragic Treasure Galleon of the Florida Keys,” National Geographic, June 1976.

  13. Concerning the many “explorer-divers” of the Bank: I interviewed Ilima Kalama by phone in August 2009; Harrison Ealey at his home in Oceanside, California, in October 2009; and Rex Bank in his Long Beach home in October 2010. Ilima Kalama wrote the liner notes to The Ventures’ album Surfing in 1963 at the age of twenty.

  14. Concerning the USS Enterprise: Some years ago, Bill Sharp located a U.S. Navy study titled “Bishop Rock Dead Ahead: The Grounding of the USS Enterprise,” by Karlene H. Roberts. My descriptions were based on Roberts’s study and a telephone conversation and email correspondences with Rear Admiral Robert Leuschner. I’m hugely grateful for the admiral’s detailed and honest attention to my queries.

  CHAPTER 4

  1. When I dove into the tales of plans to colonize the Cortes Bank, dates, locations, and facts varied wildly and details of the people who planned to erect this nation on the half shell were maddeningly scant. The true nature of this epic was first revealed through articles stored on genuine microfilm, far from the all-seeing eyes of Google. The first mention appeared on page 11 of the Pasadena Independent on Halloween of 1966 (Hal D. Stewart, “Pair Planning Island Nation off San Diego,”). I then located a number of other stories in the Web archives of the San Diego Union Tribune and the Los Angeles Times that gave names. Yet, for some time, I was unable to locate anyone.

  I learned per the Los Angeles Times that Abalonia partner Robert Lynch had died in 1997. Then one day I received an anonymously sent package. The folder bore a sixty-page manuscript with Joe Kirkwood’s incredible account. It seems he penned the story around 1967 and then sent it to Sports Illustrated. But S.I. rejected the famed golfer’s story and perhaps Kirkwood never farmed it to anyone else. I also received photos, a short film clip of Jalisco being towed under the Golden Gate Bridge, legal opinions, correspondence between several “Abalonians,” and a study titled “A Plan for an Island State,” for Bellevue, Washington–based Cortez Development Corporation. The study stated that an American engineer named Edward M. deSarra had spent more than $250,000 to plan four islands atop Cortes Bank: Taluga (2.3 acres), Aurora (26 acres), Triana (102 acres), and Bonaventura (48 acres). There would be an airport, parks, pools, putting greens, a primary school, a high school, a yacht club, and government buildings. I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to whomever sent these documents.

  Then came another break. One day in mid-October 2009, a voicemail: “Umm Mr. Dixon, this is Jim Houtz. I’m one of the guys who was aboard the Jalisco. Give me a call.”

  I managed to verify portions of both Kirkwood and Houtz’s accounts through news stories. Then in March 2010, I reached Whitney Olsen crewman Louis Ribeiro, who said that Houtz’s version of events seemed to follow his recollections. There was also record of the Coast Guard’s rescue of Kirkwood and his friend Dick Hall aboard Sallytender in the National Archives.

  2. “‘Joe Palooka’ wins $50 Million Purse” by Mitchell Smyth, Toronto Star, August 30, 1987, showed Kirkwood selling a golf course on Kauai for $50 million. “Now that he’s leaving the Hawaiian hideaway,” Smyth wrote, “Kirkwood is a little sad…‘I have a mile of beach here—it’s considered the prettiest mile of beach on the Hawaiian islands.’ But there’ll always be his golf to keep him happy. The game is also the basis for his deep belief in fair play and consideration for others. ‘It’s a game where if you cheat you are only cheating yourself. What better rule to live by?’”

  3. Eventually I
found that Abalonian Bruce McMahan still existed. Web sites exist for several organizations, including a hedge fund, a supercar company, and a philanthropy (http://www.brucemcmahan biography.com/). Emails and phone calls to a PR firm for McMahan yielded promises that calls would be returned, but none ever were. Then I stumbled upon a lead feature (Kelly Cramer, “Daddy’s Girl,” Village Voice, September 26, 2006). Cramer reported on court records indicating that in 2005, McMahan settled a lawsuit brought by a daughter born out of wedlock. The suit had claimed psychological damages in the wake of an alleged affair and even a wedding between McMahan and his daughter. True or not, Jim Houtz put it best when he said, “That’s probably why you didn’t hear from him.”

  4. Photos of the shipwreck were taken by Daniel Bresler, who had been hired by Kirkwood and then sold them to the Associated Press. I reached his son by phone in Los Angeles who told me his father’s own story—including life as a marine combat photographer.