Salvaging Doorstops

By Eric Morris

Salvaging Doorstops. It was a slow day at the dive shop when Rick walked in carrying two large, silver colored metal bars. They were shiny. Lots of people, including me, might have thought they were ingots of silver. “Got these in 50 feet of water off a downtown Seattle pier last night,” stated Rick, proudly. “It’s magnesium—worth a lot of money. A ship was unloading a few days ago and a pallet of these bars fell in the water. I read about it in the newspaper. They’re supposed to be worth $40 a bar. There were hundreds of them down there in a big pile.”I mulled that over. It was 1970 and I was making $4.25 an hour. One bar was worth more than I could make in a day. “What pier are you talking about?” I lazily queried Rick, pretending this was no big deal. “Just north of Pier 39,” replied Rick. “There is an old ladder you can go up and down right at the base of the dock. I’m going back tomorrow night to get more.” I filed this information away until an hour later when I repeated it to my dive buddy. “Jerry, a little salvage job awaits us, but we gotta go tonight because the other guy is going to be there tomorrow,” I eagerly explained. After the dive shop closed we loaded our gear in Jerry’s station wagon and drove down to the waterfront. In 1970 the southern end of the Seattle waterfront was not as busy nor as developed as it is today. In fact, at midnight there was no one around for blocks, and the entire area was poorly lit, which we thought was convenient since we had no idea if it was legal to dive off the docks and didn’t want any witnesses. We parked across the street from the pier and started suiting up. Once our gear was on, we crossed the railroad tracks and walked over to an open space between the piers where an emergency ladder led down to the water. The ladder was on the wrong side of the railing, so I climbed over the top, fins strung on my arms, and started down. It was a LONG way down, since it was low tide. The ladder was rusty and near the bottom was slippery with sea anemones and seaweed. The rungs hurt my feet because in those days wetsuit boots were just soft socks, not the nice hard sole boots we enjoy today. My arches were glad when I reached the water. Jerry waited at the top, no doubt to see if a shark or something got me, then he started down. As we left the ladder, we turned on our lights and snorkeled to the end of the pier. The water was clear and when we reached the end of the dock, we sank down to the bottom, landing right on top of an underwater junkyard. Cables, boxes, road barriers, barrels and other stuff had been dropped, pushed, or kicked off that dock over the decades. Besides all the man-made materials down there, perch, rockfish and lingcod milled about, as well as several ratfish, whose weird green eyes reflected off our dive light beams. After swimming along the pier for a hundred feet, we found our pile of magnesium bars, lying in a heap. They fairly glowed under the illumination provided by our dive lights. We looked at each other and hooted through our regulators! Our treasure awaited salvage. We each grabbed a bar and discovered they were heavier then we had thought they would be underwater. Forty pounds is still forty pounds. In those days buoyancy compensators were nothing more then slightly modified airline life-vests with little CO2 cartridges to blow them up, so we couldn’t offset the additional ingot weight very well. Being teenagers, we hadn’t really thought ahead about just how it was we were going to raise forty pound bars, so we started walking across the bottom back towards the ladder, each of us carrying his precious metal treasure. This proved to be difficult. All the crap piled on the bottom made walking somewhat like hiking over a garbage dump, a really rough garbage dump—while wearing swimfins. Up and down, jumping and kicking, we made slow progress. In a moment of inspiration, I took off my fins and strung them on my arms again, allowing me to walk like an old time hard-hat diver. This was actually faster and we made good progress as we strode across the junk. All of this work had us breathing our air at a prodigious rate and Jerry signaled he was running low, so we shimmied up a nearby piling and surfaced. We still had about fifty feet to go before we reached the ladder, so we kicked like mad and “piling hopped” to our goal. We hung onto the rungs, catching our breath. Now all we had to do was climb thirty feet up the anemone coated ladder with our ingots, roll over the railing and we’d be on the sidewalk. This perhaps sounds simple for two stalwart lads such as ourselves, but it proved to not be an easy task either. We could only hang onto the ladder with one hand as the other was gripping the metal ingot. This meant we had to pull ourselves up with one arm, let go of that rung and in a split second grab for the next highest rung—with the same hand! Our old fashioned tank straps dug deeply into our shoulders and strangled the blood circulation to our arms with the result that the higher we climbed, the more feeble our limbs grew. Every few feet I stopped and set the ingot halfway onto a rung to relieve my aching biceps, however, standing on the narrow ladder for even a few seconds made the arches of my feet throb in protest. No matter what I tried, something hurt. Two thirds of the way up my tank shifted to one shoulder, I lost my balance, swung off to one side of the ladder and fell twenty feet to land with a tremendous splash right alongside Jerry. The salvage operation had encountered its first problem. The ingot tucked beneath my right arm naturally provided the ballast needed for me to continue my journey to the bottom of the sea. Since I didn’t have my regulator in my mouth, my mask had been around my neck, my fins around my elbows and my dive light was turned off, this little trip was more exciting than I would have preferred. Being young and dumb, it never occurred to me to let go of my trophy bar of magnesium. As my ears squealed in protest and I dropped like a freight elevator, I searched for my regulator. I found it twirling above my head in the wash of water which swept by me during the descent. Then I crunched into the bottom, thankfully sand at point of impact.I was nearly out of air, without fins on, in pitch black darkness and my mask was awash, but I still clutched that ingot! A minute later I was back on the surface. Jerry told me to watch how it was done and started up the ladder. It didn’t take him long to replicate my descent. We made two more attempts, always with the same result. Our experiment to hand-carry ingots up the ladder proved fruitless. I decided my $4.25 an hour job might pay meagerly, but was decidedly less painful. We reluctantly let our bright magnesium buddies rejoin their companions. They glinted in the beams of our dive lights like gigantic fish lures as they sank. I’m sure they are lying there to this day. When Rick returned to the dive shop a couple of days later, he waved a pink traffic ticket in my face. He’d gone back with his buddy and they’d been arrested for “Diving underneath city docks”. This was actually written up on the ticket which I read with my own eyes.I guess that answered my question about whether or not it was legal to dive along the Seattle waterfront. Thus ended the great magnesium ingot salvage job.A few years later I asked Rick what he’d done with those two bars he’d salvaged on the first dive.

“They make great doorstops.” was his reply.