i need to take up diving...I could use some silver...and some junk cars...
Teredo worms?
The bane of the Tall Ships!
Not good bait. That worm would eat the fish.
One of those worms should run for Congress. Fit right in.
ping
2. Teredos and Gribbles
Two kinds of hungry pests gnaw away at the pilings that hold up structures like the FDR Drive, the U.N. school on East 25th Street, and the Con Ed plant at 14th. Teredos, which start life looking like tiny clams, grow up to be worms “as big around as your thumb, and nearly four feet long, with little triangular teeth,” says commercial diver Lenny Speregen. Like underwater termites, they devour wood. And Limnoria tripunctata, a.k.a. “gribbles,” are bugs about the size of a pencil dot that look like tiny armadillos, and eat not only wood but also concrete. Speregen says he’s seen fifteen-inch-diameter columns that have been gnawed down, hourglass style, to three inches. The city has tried jacketing pilings in heavy plastic to keep the critters out, but it hasn’t worked well: Floating ice tears up the jackets in winter. “I never said this wasn’t a war,” says Speregen.
6. Dead Bodies
When homicides and suicides end up in the river during winter, they often stay underwater until April, when decomposition speeds up, bloating them with gases. They then bob up, and currents have been known to drive them to nooks near the Seaport and Manhattan Bridge. “The worst one I ever saw was half in the mud, half out,” says John Drzal, a veteran of the NYPD scuba team. “The skin was peeling back.” He scuttles his fingers up his arm. “The critters were eating it.”
7. Surveillance Systems
The U.S. Coast Guard operates anti-swimmer sonar systems, which are moved around as they’re needed in the harbor. The gear pings signals out, and displays hits—indicating unidentified people or boats—on a video screen. The Coast Guard also does pier sweeps: “If someone puts something on a piling”—say, an electronic device—“we find it,” says USCG gunner’s mate Dave Boles. In 2007, near Liberty Island, he recalls, “someone was spotted in a black Zodiac at night, and we had to check it out.” The mystery boater was never identified.
11. A Formica Dinette
“In the East River, at about 16th Street, there’s one of those old dining-room tables, the kind with a Formica top and the grooved metal bands around the edge,” says Speregen. “It’s standing upright, totally free and clear. It makes me want to go down there with teacups and set it up.”
12. Another Shipwreck
Unidentified, at 37 feet.
13. Hudson River Alligators
The quaint wooden pilings you see at the edge of Manhattan, the ones that trace the outlines of long-gone piers, are a hazard in the making. When a storm knocks one of them loose, the resultant floater—a “Hudson River alligator”—becomes a twenty-foot battering ram. Army Corps of Engineers patrols scoop them up, but they can’t spot every one. “You’ve seen a SeaStreak, those fast commuter ferries that serve Wall Street?” says Speregen. “One’s gonna get impaled one of these days.”
15. A 1968 Lincoln Continental
A group of commercial divers spotted the vehicle in 1978 off Coney Island, where it lay, belly-up, twenty feet off the end of the old Steeplechase Pier. “It was probably a polluter for the first twenty years—oil coming up and all that,” says Lenny Speregen. It’s rotting, but “the frame is still there, and the engine block. And the tires, believe it or not.”
22. Out-of-Date Channels
This groove in the harbor bottom is Ambrose Channel, which is the main shipping route into New York Harbor. It’s maintained by the Army Corps of Engineers at a depth of 45 feet. That’s not enough for the biggest new super-container ships, which require 60-foot clearance, and the Corps is finishing up a decadelong project to deepen the channels and tap those ships’ estimated $20 billion worth of commerce. Some of our dredged material contains a century’s worth of pollutants, from mercury to DDT—substances not a lot of places want. At one point, mud was being hauled to a dump in Utah, at the cost of $118 per cubic yard (plain old dumping is about $5 per). Some of it now goes to Texas; some becomes the sandy fill in concrete.
23. 1,600 Bars of Silver, Weighing 100 Pounds Apiece
In 1903, a barge in the Arthur Kill—the oily, mucky arm of the harbor between Staten Island and New Jersey—capsized, spilling its cargo of silver ingots. It carried 7,678 bars; about 6,000 were recovered soon after. The rest are still down there. At today’s prices, they’re worth about $26 million. Every now and then, someone tries to find them. So far, no luck.
25. Appetizers
There are millions of hard-shell clams on the harbor bottom, but pollutants and bacteria can make the shellfish dangerous to eat, especially raw. Some are okay for “relay,” a process whereby tainted shellfish are moved to a clean spot for a few weeks so they purge themselves and can be safely consumed. Most high-end suppliers and restaurants shy away from such clams, but because they’re much cheaper, some establishments inconspicuously serve them.
28. The Last Remnants of Dreamland
One of Coney Island’s great early theme parks, Dreamland existed for only a few years before it burned down in 1911. Nothing survives of it aboveground, but a group that Speregen co-founded, called Cultural Research Divers, found the lampposts underwater, melted and deformed from the fire.
Cool!
