In 1981, we returned with an efficiently organized expedition.

Alan Albright, chief marine archaeologist with the University of South Carolina, was most cooperative, loaning us a boat and a team of divers.

Bill Shea operated his home-built proton magnetometer along with Walt Schob, who steered the search boat back and forth along the grid lines.

A second vessel, a dive boat, followed behind to check out any interesting anomalies found by Bill's mag. The diving operation was headed by Ralph Wilbanks, the state archaeologist who represented the university.

To keep the mag survey boat in precise position at all times, the Motorola NEni Ranger Navigation Unit was used, with my son, Dirk, sitting in an oven-hot rental van on shore, staring at a graph and giving directions that kept Schob on a straight course while running narrow lanes of thirty meters.

Although we ran over five hundred miles of search lanes, we failed to pass over the grave of the Hunley. Our dive boat, however, discovered the remains of four Confederate blockade runners, the Union ironclad monitors Weehawken and Patapsco, and the dual-citadel ironclad, Keokuk. We were finally getting our act together.

After every expedition, we always take what we call a graduation picture of everyone involved with the project. As I studied the seventeen volunteers who worked so hard to find the Hunley and accomplished so much in the discovery of other Civil War shipwrecks, I wondered what a leaner and meaner crew could do.

In the spring of 1982, armed with the faithful Schonstedt gradiometer, always loaned to us by a wonderful and kindly man, Erick Schonstedt, who supported NUMA every inch of the way, Walt Schob and I set out for a wreck survey on the lower Mississippi River. Renting a station wagon, when they still built them, at the airport, we drove through New Orleans and down into the river delta until we reached the end of the highway at a town called Venice, the jumping-off point for supplies and crews heading for offshore oil-drilling rigs.

Here we charted a small sixteen-foot aluminum skiff that was owned by a taciturn Cajun fisherman. The first morning, he took my money and never spoke a word to us. By the third day he realized we were nice guys and began telling Cajun jokes. Because I had broken my right ankle two days before, and had a cast halfway to my knee, he kindly loaned me a lawn chair so I could sit comfortably in the bow, my plaster cast propped on the boat's gunnel, hanging out over the muddy water of the river like a battering ram.

During three days of magging, we found the Confederate ironclads Manassas, next to a load of iron pipe, and Louisiana, both later identified in an on-site study by a scientific team from Texas A & M.

We also discovered the remains of the gunboats Governor Moore and Varuna, sunk during the battle of the forts when Admiral David Farragut's fleet of Union warships captured the city of New Orleans.