signed to weather the heavy seas which we would be 

 called upon to face many times in the future, as we pur- 

 sued our explorations to the Bahamas and the Caribbean 

 islands. If we seriously intended to continue this historical 

 salvage, we must have more adequate equipment. 



So I was not surprised when, at breakfast one windy 

 morning, Ed said, "Let's take the bus up to Miami and 

 look at boats. Perhaps we can find a larger sailboat than 

 Blue Heron that would do the work for us. At least we 

 would have a ship we could go to sea in when the wind 

 is blowing. That's more than we can do with this cockle- 

 shell." 



He was still thinking sails, for he had never been 

 won over to the lure of liigh-powered diesel cruisers. So, 

 later that morning, when we explained our problem to 

 our yacht broker in Miami, it was sailboats we asked to 

 see. We spent the day looking at sail, but none seemed to 

 meet our needs. Toward the end of the day we were 

 returning from inspecting a boat in Coconut Grove, 

 south of Miami, when our discouraged companion had a 

 hunch. 



"There's a sixty-five-foot diesel trawler near here," he 

 said dubiously. "The owner finished her up from a shrimp- 

 boat hull built at Miami Shipbuilding last year." 



We weren't at all impressed. We were looking for 

 sail. But we allowed ourselves to be driven to a nearby 

 dock where lay Sea Diver, then known as St. Christopher. 



There she sat, solid and sturdy, all sixty-five feet of 

 her; she was eighteen feet in the beam, with a high, 

 straight bow that sloped steeply toward the aft deck. The 

 cabin was all shrimp boat. To this day, whenever I think 

 of her, I am reminded of the early Popeye cartoons, for 

 there wasn't a straight line in her entire construction. The 

 deck sloped, the pilothouse curved, the window frames 

 were all angles, the door frames conformed to the sloping 



54 Sea Diver 



