Treasure hunting – high-tech style

Sportsman’s quest for fish turns up quite a different catch

By M. Sharon Murphy, Journal-American Staff Writer, Tuesday, August 4, 1987

All Scott Lafferty wanted to do was chart the ocean floor so he could find rock formations where bottom fish linger. His goal: to catch the most fish. What he created was a high-tech computer tool that not only found rocks and fish, but also helped a group called the Columbus-America Discovery Group find one of the nation’s most significant historic shipwrecks, a paddle-wheel steamer which sunk off the South Carolina Coast in 1857 with about $450 million in gold coins from the California Gold Rush.

PRETTY GOOD for a fisherman with a high school education, who flunked the only computer class he ever took.

The Columbus, Ohio-based Discovery Group found the Central America last summer, but the group only made public its discovery three weeks ago after successfully suing in U.S. District Court in Virginia for jurisdiction over its claim.

And now Lafferty is having a hard time keeping the door to his Bellevue-based office at Info Express closed.

Though the one-year-old company — founded by Lafferty, Steve Lambert, Salley Oberlin, and Joyce Cox, all formerly of Microsoft Press — also offers a full range of publishing services (They get “Information where you need it, how you need it and when you need it”), more customers are asking about Lafferty’s real-time data display imaging system than the company’s computer books.

Before the system was created, anyone using sonar to “see” the ocean (or lake) floor either looked at incomplete charts that have undefined areas, or they waited months to receive transcripts of the 9-track taped data on parts of the ocean floor surveyed ages ago.

When officials of a Seattle sonar company told Lafferty they didn’t think he could design a personal-computer-based imaging system because it would be too slow and the graphics wouldn’t be good, he jumped at the challenge.

AFTER READING programming books and thinking about the project for six months, Lafferty sat down and in one month wrote his first program in “C” — a complicated, high-speed computer language. He requested some old sonar data to make sure the program worked, and then he called up the sonar company to show them what he had.

“We went to do a show-and-tell at Williamson & Associates,” he says. “They only had 15 minutes, and we got down there an hour before to set up the equipment to make sure our 15 minutes was well spent.

“They were ecstatic, and kept calling people to come and look at it.” Lafferty was there for at least four hours.

Known as RTDDA (real-time data display and acquisition), Lafferty’s system has revolutionized the immediate, or “real-time” acquisition and imaging of survey data from sidescan sonar.

The RTDDA system, both software and hardware, permits ocean searchers to view on a video screen the profile of objects detected by a towed apparatus that bounces sound off the ocean floor — as a ship plies along.

There’s no limit to the depth a person can view, Lafferty says, and though the RTDDA could detect a gold coin on the ocean floor, a person probably wouldn’t be able to identify it. “A Thermos bottle or ropes on a plane can be identified,” he says.

A person can see up to a seven-mile patch of ocean floor and the rock composition of the earth underneath the seabed to a depth of about 100 yards — the length of a football field.

As it projects images of the ocean floor, the RTDDA spits out 250 million pieces of information an hour, including information about the ship’s speed and location, the angle and speed of the sonar, and each location of the piece of ocean floor off which the sonar has bounced.

The information is stored on optical discs that each can hold about five file cabinets of printed material. The discs are much smaller than the 9-track tapes many oil companies and geologists use, and one disc stores as much as four 9-track tapes.

FINDING the Central America was the RTDDA’s first test run. Actually, Lafferty and the other crew members didn’t know what they were searching for.

“It was run like a CIA operation,” he says. “The same way the military would carry out an operation. We had words for certain things that weren’t actually what they were. I’ll bet the skipper of the boat still doesn’t know to this day what we were looking for.”

Lafferty wasn’t the only West Coast representative on the Central America treasure hunt. Chris Hancock, who was working for Seattle-based Williamson & Associates Inc. — the firm that owns and operates the SeaMARC sidescan sonar — also was at sea, and two Eastside companies also played a role.

The wreckage of the gold-laden stern-wheeler, Central America, was discovered off the South Carolina coast using a sonar image system developed by Info Express.

Redmond-based International Submarine Technology designed and built the sonar, and Sound Ocean Systems Inc., based in Issaquah, designed and built the platform — a “towfish” in oceanographic jargon — which is a metal frame to which the sonar equipment is attached.

Lafferty and Hancock spent 40 days mapping the ocean floor for the Discovery Group. Hancock was so impressed with Lafferty’s imaging system that he now works for Info Express as the company’s sales and marketing manager.

Lafferty and Hancock, who are not allowed to discuss details about their treasure hunt, say they were fed bits and pieces of information after they were at sea — probably so no one else would find out about the possible location of the ship and treasure.

TREASURE SEEKERS aren’t the only ones impressed with the RTDDA system. Info Express has logged many hours at sea searching for volcanic vents in the Pacific and looking for potential oil well sites in the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. Navy also is very interested in the RTDDA.

Lafferty’s treasure hunting days are on hold for now, and he’s so busy working on adaptations of the RTDDA that he doesn’t have time to fish.

Instead, he reads complicated computer programming and calculus books — “for fun,” Lambert and Hancock joke — to help him improve the RTDDA.

“We’ve never had to look for a customer,” he says, “and I’ve only seen my boat twice in two years.”