This second attempt to locate the Richard was headed by former Navy Commander Eric Berryman- We covered ten times as much territory with a cost factor less than half the first effort. This trip I had the good fortune to meet and work with Peter Throckmorton and Bill Shea of Brandeis University, both of whom became trustees of NUMA. I also found a solid and comfortable boat called the Arvor III, a yacht that was strangely built to the specifications of a Scottish fishing trawler. An indomitable Scot by the name of Jimmy Flett was the Arvor's skipper, and a finer man I've never met. Even with a top-rated team, we still failed to find the elusive Bonhomme Richard. We did, however, run onto and identify a Russian spy trawler that had mysteriously sunk a short time prior to our discovery. The Royal Navy was immediately notified, and they initiated a classified underwater investigation. I never did learn what secrets they found.

Someday, I'll give it another try. Gary Kozak once said, "Shipwrecks are never found until they want to be found." Hopefully, next time the Richard will be ready to show a beckoning finger.

NUMA was now a reality, and with very canny and respected people on board as trustees and advisors, including Commander Don Walsh, who made the ocean's deepest dive aboard the Trieste; Doc Harold Edgerton, the energetic and prodigious inventor of the side scan sonar and the strobe light; and Admiral Bill Thompson, who almost singlehandedly directed the funding and construction of the Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C we began an earnest program of shipwreck search projects.

After the unsuccessful '78 and '79 expeditions, we turned our ventures to home shores and made our initial try for the Confederate submarine Hunley in the summer of 1980. This preliminary search took in a small grid extending one-half mile from the inlet the Hunley sailed through outside Charleston, South Carolina, before she torpedoed the Union sloop-of-war Housatonic. After the attack, she and her nine-man crew vanished, never realizing they had gone down in history books as the first submarine to sink a warship.

It soon became apparent, after research and initial probing into the seafloor outside of Charleston, that the Hunley had slowly become buried in the soft silt that covers the seabed off the coast. We found that the remains of Housatonic had also worked their way under the seafloor.

The only instrument generally used to locate a hidden object entombed under saltwater and sediment is a magnetometer. If the side scan sonar is the right arm of any shipwreck search, the magnetometer is the left. The two metal detectors used most frequently for finding and measuring the magnetic intensity of a buried iron object are the proton mag and a gradiometer. Both basically do the same thing, but use different systems of measurement.

After finding no trace of the Hunley near shore, we realized the search grid had to be greatly expanded.