Originally Published Wednesday, July 16, 2003
Underwater work more than murky
By: Michael Fitzgerald
Boats sink. All over the Delta.
Boaters crash boats. Boaters scuttle boats. Boaters
run boats aground. Inexperienced
boaters beach at low tide, and
then high tide swamps the boats.
Or the lubbers tie up at high tide
and, when that darned tricky tide
flows out, the boats flip.
Plus,
water lines break, fittings spring
leaks, et cetera.
There are hundreds
of sunken boats in the Delta --
roughly 70 in San Joaquin County
and at least four in Smith Canal,
the sleepy midtown waterway where
Capt. Bill Spangler of TowBoatU.S.
Delta is working this week.
Diver
and salvage master, Spangler has
been raising sunken boats, sunken
objects and sometimes sunken people
for more than 20 years. Clad in
a wet suit, he was neck deep in
the canal, working to raise a half-submerged
derelict cabin cruiser, when I
caught up with him.
"It's really kind of strange," Spangler,
63, said of his work.
Sinkers
You could see why. Smith Canal is leafy and placid on the surface, but below, it's a watery dump. Who knows what's down there. Visibility in the murky water is zero. Spangler must work by feel.
"The thing that's bad about blackwater stuff is you never know what's down there, because you can't see it," Spangler said. "You
bump something and it comes
down all of a sudden, and
it's got you."
Working with his girlfriend, Renee Gibber, his son, Wes, a couple of boats and a water pump, Spangler first surveys sunken boats.
The splintering wooden 38-foot cabin cruiser had settled to the bottom in 5 feet of water. Its port gunwale, or left-side upper deck edge, was under 2 feet of water; its starboard gunwale tilted 1 foot above water. Most of the pilothouse was above.
Probably it'd just been ignored long enough that water gradually seeped in and sank it.
Diving on an airline, Spangler ran straps under the hull. To the straps, he attached four deflated yellow airbags. Each airbag can lift 2,000 pounds. His crew pumped air into the bags. Righting, the boat came up, mud-caked and shedding water to be further pumped out. Frogs had left billowy green sacs on the stern.
"Anybody want some frog's eggs?" Spangler
inquired.
Body recovery
"I think the worst case I ever had -- and I almost puked in my mask -- was down by Collinsville," Spangler
recollected. Two men were
asleep on the stern deck of
a 45-foot wooden boat anchored
in the river one night. Without
warning, an 18-foot speedboat
plowed full-speed into the
hull. The speeder backed out.
The bigger boat sank. One
of the sleepers went down
with her.
Spangler dove inside the gloomy wreck to find him.
"Now that's spooky," he said. "You
have all the cushions, you
have the deck plate all floating.
... I found him on the deck
in the back. Bumped into his
leg."
Spangler hooked the corpse's
arm and surfaced. A deputy
sheriff cried out in alarm.
Spangler turned to see the
corpse leaning against him
was missing half of his head. "For a long time I thought about that one," he
said.
There's also a lighter side. Spangler once dove to recover somebody's dentures.
Once the dripping cabin cruiser in Smith Canal was afloat, Spangler hitched it to his 25-foot modified Bayliner and slowly towed it out to the river. At a nearby boat yard, the boat will be hauled out, cut up and disposed of.
On this cleanup, Spangler is working with a city code officer who identifies the boat's owner through its CF number or other means and sends them the hefty salvage bill.
"I love it. I wouldn't do anything else," said Spangler. "No
two boats are the same."
|
Stockton,
CA 
Canal