Seattle's High-Tech Treasure Hunters

On an early November morning in 1875, scores of miners, speculators, and societal elites packed a boat in Victoria that had already sunk once before.

The San Francisco–bound SS Pacific was one of many newly constructed and hastily rehabbed steamships filling the harbor after the discovery of gold in northern creeks of British Columbia. The vessel had foundered in the Columbia River after hitting a rock and been abandoned on the mudflats of San Francisco Bay only three years earlier. But the abundance of precious cargo in the Cassiar region demanded the reincarnation of this rickety ship.

Few among the throngs rushing the deck likely knew this history. But they knew about the gold. Miners carried it in little leather pouches, while others stowed it in their luggage, a purser’s safe, or a room guarded by a Wells Fargo agent. There were plenty of potential thieves around—at least 250 people were aboard, and even as the gangplank rose, more clambered on. The vessel was so crowded that crew members filled lifeboats with water to keep it from listing.

After finally pushing off, the Pacific dawdled out to sea, its paddle wheels churning against a stiff headwind and a strong swell. It passed Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost tip of the contiguous United States, at about 4pm. But at 10pm, long after darkness had settled over the ocean, quartermaster Neil Henly felt a jolt.

Henly dutifully rose from his bunk to inspect the cargo area, where, to his horror, he saw water surging inward. Upstairs, he’d soon learn, the scene was even grimmer.

The Pacific had collided with another ship, the S/V Orpheus. It was less of a crash and more a series of love taps as the steamship scraped against the northbound sailing vessel. The Pacific had attempted to halt its progress. But it was too late.

Crew members tried to lower lifeboats, some of which still held water, to save the masses angling to escape. Henly managed to board one, only to have it strike the ship and fill with seawater. On the open sea, he climbed onto a floating chunk of the hurricane deck. As he waited for help, he heard passengers screaming for their lives and the wheezing sound of the Pacific collapsing beneath the surface. The Orpheus, meanwhile, sailed away.

Henly survived for days before another boat scooped him up. So too would one other passenger. Everyone else aboard the Pacific perished. In a particularly cruel twist, a few of their bodies washed ashore near where the ship had departed. “No greater calamity was ever visited on the people of this Coast than the loss of the steamship Pacific,” E. W. Wright declared in his 1895 volume, Lewis and Dryden’s Marine History of the Pacific Northwest.

More than a century after the Pacific sank, Jeff Hummel sat down with a later edition of Wright’s tome. His Mercer Island High School friend, Matt McCauley, had lent him a copy. The teenagers were researching wrecks in the tempestuous, wreck-laden stretch of sea known as the Graveyard of the Pacific. They envisioned salvaging a bunch of these underwater time capsules one day.

The Pacific was on their list. Its poor condition, coupled with an inexperienced, light crew, may have contributed to its demise. Still, many Victorians blamed the crew of the Orpheus, which had mistaken the light of the Pacific for Cape Flattery. A coroner’s jury found that Orpheus captain Charles Sawyer, who claimed he never saw the Pacific go under, had turned into the Pacific’s path and cost hundreds of people their lives.

But Hummel would never forget what else was lost in the wreck, either. The ship was carrying, among other things, about 2,000 sacks of oats, 300 bales of hops, 280 tons of coal, two cases of opium, and “$79,220 treasure from Victoria.” Or, in contemporary terms, millions of dollars in gold.

The deadliest shipwreck in the history of the Pacific Northwest was also perhaps the most lucrative. Hummel would spend the next three decades hunting for it. He’d meticulously gather clues about what had happened to the ship, analyzing everything from ancient tidal charts in Astoria, Oregon, to coal found in a Westport fisherman’s net to depressions on the ocean’s floor.

In 2016, he founded a company, Rockfish Inc., that raised upwards of $1.4 million from dozens of friends and family members to support its voyages and technology, with no promise of any return on their investments. Somewhere along the way, Hummel realized the quest reminded him of those connect-the-dots puzzles he loved as a child. Even when one discovery appeared unrelated to another, he had to trust they would eventually tie together and bring him closer to seeing the full picture—to finding the Pacific.

Standing by the pool during a lifeguard certification class, Matt McCauley sized up the tall kid nearby who had his friend’s ear. It was one of the first days of 10th grade at Mercer Island High School, and McCauley was still getting to know the unfamiliar faces who’d matriculated from the other junior high school in town. This one belonged to Jeff Hummel, a confident type who, McCauley’s pal would later confide in him, had a big plan.

Hummel wanted to assemble a team of divers to retrieve a seaplane the size of a modern 747 from the bottom of Lake Washington. Hummel’s father, a research mechanic at Boeing in the middle of the twentieth century, had watched the Martin PBM Mariner sink while he was on a lunch break at the Renton plant.

McCauley wanted in. He’d grown up exploring the depths of nearby waters. His father, uncle, and great-uncle were all skin divers, spearfishing in Puget Sound before scuba technology had gone mainstream. McCauley himself had pulled bottles from the lake for sport and dabbled with nascent sonar technology.

The audacious McCauley swiftly earned Hummel’s trust, and the new friends starting meeting to figure out how to raise the massive seaplane from the floor of the log-filled lake. They scoured old maritime and historical texts for guidance, applying a rigor to their preparation they absorbed from their debate team coach, Mary Lindquist. She can still recall their curiosity and drive, as well as their devotion to getting dressed up on weekends for debate tournaments. “They were definitely nerds,” Lindquist says.

But they were also daredevils. Lindquist was “astounded” by the diving operation she learned they’d assembled. In his father’s garage, Hummel would rig up apparatuses for McCauley to test on Lake Washington. They’d gather air hoses from gas stations in Mercer Island and Bellevue, and lift bags from some generous hippies in Enumclaw. “Jeff was the kid that could build the most advanced sophisticated bike ramp imaginable,” McCauley says. “But I was the kid that would actually ride the bike over the bike ramp the first time.”

McCauley would swim around in pitch-black water 150 feet deep, flashing beams of light like a lightsaber. He also acquired, after an insurance settlement from a car accident, a side-scan sonar for them to use, along with a handheld sonar to locate objects underwater. He’d tie lift bags to the artifacts they discovered and then, when they were both safely in the boat, Hummel would pump air into the bags so they’d shoot skyward. The clean-cut kids were careful, but it was still something of a miracle that no one ever got hurt. “Thank God our parents never really knew what we were up to,” Hummel says.

Before dinner, they’d make trips to the library in downtown Seattle to research the Martin PBM Mariner. They also learned about other underwater treasures in the region’s storied maritime history.

Many of them lay in the precarious Graveyard of the Pacific. The coastline that runs unofficially from Vancouver Island down to Oregon earned that moniker by the end of the nineteenth century after its rocky shores, foul weather, and two dangerous bars—at the mouth of the Columbia and the Strait of Juan de Fuca—claimed somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 ships. “It’s one of the most dangerous stretches of water in the world,” says Coll Thrush, a professor at the University of British Columbia and the author of a forthcoming book about the Graveyard of the Pacific.

Despite its unmatched death toll, the Pacific wasn’t especially well-remembered, Thrush says. Later wrecks got more notoriety as media coverage proliferated. Still, the boys flagged it for future salvage missions.

In the short term, they were fixated on the aircraft at the bottom of the lake in their backyard. Though a Boeing factory sat off the southern end of Lake Washington, most felled planes came from the US Naval Air station at Sand Point to the north, what’s today known as Magnuson Park. When a military plane was “stricken” after a hard landing, its damaged body would be stripped for parts, set aflame for firefighting drills, and unceremoniously dumped into the lake. (“There was no such thing as environmentalism,” McCauley says.)

One March morning in 1984, the hulk of a plane breached like a whale in the middle of Lake Washington. Aboard a little ski boat, rocking in the considerable wake of the 6,500-pound dive bomber’s 150-foot ascent, Hummel and McCauley celebrated. The two 19-year-olds had spent years working for this moment, saving money and scrounging parts. McCauley had even salvaged the boat they were standing on from the bottom of the lake.

But no sooner had they started to envision towing the “Helldiver” to shallower water than the lift bags propping it up began to sink. It was an unseasonably cold day, and the relief valves that prevented the pillow-
like floats from overinflating were malfunctioning due to ice buildup. As air escaped the bags, the bomber plunged, and the line connecting the plane to the boat tightened. The vessel jerked backward, like Jaws had gotten a hold of it, until its transom dipped under water.

McCauley darted to the stern with a knife and cut the line. But the boat was already too swamped to save. McCauley’s ex-girlfriend, who’d joined for what was supposed to be a pleasant boat ride, and Hummel both swam off in life jackets. McCauley nearly went down with the ship before he popped the release on a fuel tank. He floated up to the surface along with the container amid a growing debris field.

A neighbor watching the scene phoned the King County Sheriff, who came by with a boat to rescue the teenagers. But Hummel and McCauley were far from chagrined. Soon, they’d return to raise the plane again. This time, they paid a tugboat about $300 to tow it to shore. The plane was missing an engine, much of its tail, and half of its wings, but Hummel’s father confirmed that it was indeed a Helldiver.

After they managed to haul the dive bomber onto a trailer and transport it to a hangar in Renton, a prospective buyer backed out, worried the US Navy would reclaim the plane. Sure enough, Hummel and McCauley soon heard from a US attorney who said the navy wanted its aircraft back. If they didn’t comply, the military would just come take it. “No, you’re going to pay us,” Hummel recalls telling the lawyer.     

Hummel and McCauley brought the plane back to McCauley’s house, where it sat on a trailer in the driveway for all to behold. The Seattle Times came to photograph the spectacle; local TV stations flocked for interviews. Then a guy with a bad haircut in a polyester suit paid them a visit. It was a process server. The US Navy was taking them to court.

The boys weren’t optimistic about their chances. As they’d conducted their research about the aircraft, they’d written letters to military officials inquiring about the prospect of ownership. The responses they got made it sound like the boys had a legal green light—or at least had uncovered a gray area. But now, they figured, the government would side with its military.

However, with the help of a few pro bono lawyers, Hummel and McCauley prevailed in the federal civil suit. Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that the Navy had intentionally abandoned its plane. The divers, he concluded, “were energetic and well-mannered young men that helped make this country what it is,” a Times story reported afterward.

McCauley and Hummel, meanwhile, were ecstatic. They’d sell the Helldiver and recover more planes from the lake over the next few years. During that time, they’d also assist with one of the first known attempts to find a long-lost ship.

All the hoopla around the teenagers who salvaged a naval plane caught the attention of a wealthy consortium in Los Angeles. They were putting together a team to hunt for a sunken ship called the Pacific, and wanted Hummel’s help. In the mid-1980s, Hummel accompanied the group to hunt for the boat. Working part-time at an underwater equipment company then, McCauley helped stock the ship with leased equipment.

Unlike the boys who had made the library stacks their haunt to find planes in Lake Washington, however, the people running this diving mission didn’t do enough homework. They leaned on newspaper accounts of the Pacific’s location and never came close to the wreck. “It struck me at the time that their research was inadequate,” Hummel says, with a nasally matter-of-factness that’s served him well during a career at the intersection of sales and technology.

Hummel would keep doing his own detective work. After attending UW, he started a medical supply business, American Medical Expendables (AMMEX), with one of his fraternity brothers. On sales trips, he’d tack an extra day or two on to conduct archival research about the Pacific in cities such as Washington, DC, New York, and San Francisco.

But it was at the Mukilteo Library where he’d view a document that raised the stakes of his pursuit. In an 1878 account of the wreck, the former gold commissioner of the Cassiar district in northern British Columbia makes a passing allusion to the amount of gold aboard the Pacific. At the time, Hummel still had the $79,220 number from Lewis and Dryden’s in the back of his head. Not nothing, but not a fortune, either.

Rolling the microfilm of a paper that was housed at the University of California, Berkeley, Hummel strained to read the beginning of the sentence inked in a quill pen. Something something “$100,000 in Cassiar gold.”

A librarian walked by, and Hummel asked her what she thought. He read it again with her help: “Some each possessed $100,000 in Cassiar gold.”

“That sort of changes everything,” Hummel says.

He started looking for a partner to plan an expedition. McCauley was unavailable—he had moved to Baltimore and embarked on a coffee roasting venture. But in nearby Annapolis, Hummel would meet Bill Mathers, a professional salvage expert who’d recently recovered some treasure from a Manila galleon. In 1993, they’d venture out on a 185-foot research vessel with a crew of roughly 30 people.

This time, it was Hummel’s research guiding the hunt. He’d spent years conducting “re-nav”—approximating where the ship might be in the ocean. He’d tracked down every trip the steamer had made in the two years before the wreck to calculate its average speed. He’d enlisted two contractors to estimate the tide on that day in 1875. He’d learned that rain and a once-in-a-century-or-longer tidal event had sent a massive outflow of fresh water from the Columbia into the Pacific that reversed the normal clockwise current around Vancouver Island. He’d found a letter that confirmed an experienced boat pilot who’d crossed the Columbia bar on the day the Pacific sank had traveled 50 miles farther north than expected. After all of this, Hummel authored a 70-page report about the Pacific’s whereabouts.

Yet, as they surveyed the area using sonar, they couldn’t find the wreck. Hummel remembers seeing one potential image of the boat, but it was never logged.

For the next decade, Hummel mostly focused on his career. Boeing acquired the first marine navigation system company he worked at, Nobeltec, in 2001. At his next employer, Rose Point Navigation Systems, he found himself vying for some of the same business as his former colleagues. “I basically snatched their launch customer away from them,” he says. “I just love stuff like that. It’s a blast. It’s fun to compete and to crush your competitors.”

In 2004, he bought the SeaBlazer, a weathered 80-foot vessel. Hummel spent so much time fixing up the boat, McCauley remembers, that Hummel’s girlfriend at the time thought he was cheating on her. Finally, more than a decade later and with no Pacific in sight, he couldn’t wait any longer. He started a company to find the steamship, drawing financial support for voyages from friends and family. “I’ve always been startup-minded,” he says. “I see an idea, and then I want to go do it.”

He named the company Rockfish as a decoy. If anyone asked what they were doing out at sea, he and his crew told them they were conducting research on the yellow-eyed rockfish, which is endangered. Though most of their nautical neighbors at Fishermen’s Terminal in Seattle didn’t ask any further questions, one harbormaster wasn’t buying it. “I don’t know what you guys do,” Hummel recalls him saying, “but it’s not rockfish research.”

“Anything that can break, will,” Sarah Haberstroh says from her seat inside the SeaBlazer. It’s a serene November day. Haberstroh, Hummel, and other Rockfish crew have just made a short trip to the waters of Elliott Bay, where the company is conducting what has become a regular survey for the deadliest wreck in Puget Sound history.

Finding the site of the SS Dix, a member of the city’s mosquito fleet that collided with another steamer and sank in 1906, killing at least 42 people, would be the discovery of a lifetime for some marine archaeologists. After all, in 2011 OceanGate Inc., the Everett company behind the infamous Titan submersible implosion in 2023 that killed its founder, Seattle magnate Stockton Rush, and everyone else on board—thought it had located the Dix, only to later discover its data didn’t match the felled ship.

But the site, seemingly a stone’s throw from the city’s skyline, has secretly served for years as a practice field for Rockfish as it prepared for its longer, tech-driven Pacific expeditions. While it’s never good for anything to break, it’s inevitable. And it’s better for it to happen close to home than out on the ocean. Factoring in food, fuel, and equipment rental for a crew of six to eight people, those trips can cost as much $100,000.

At first, Hummel leased all of their equipment before realizing it would be more cost-effective to develop some of his own. Drawing from his experience at an underwater robotics company, Hummel built a pair of remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) that crew members could drop into the sea as deep as 1,000 meters. The suitcase-size drones maneuver around wrecks, capturing sonar images and video as Rockfish employees operate them from the boat or shore using Starlink internet.

Hummel hired Haberstroh, a veteran of ROV-guided searches and the US Navy, to be the company’s first ROV pilot. She uses a joystick to control them. “You’ve seen these in the news lately, maybe,” Haberstroh quips as she holds up the controller, alluding to one of the viral revelations from the Titan implosion.

Technological advancements have made wrecks more accessible to enthusiasts and smaller organizations, says Scott Williams of the Astoria, Oregon–based Maritime Archaeological Society. Now anyone can go on Amazon or eBay and find drones, side-scan sonars, and other equipment needed for finding stuff underwater. But it’s hardly foolproof. As the crew prepared to launch one of the ROVs on the Dix, a cord suddenly needed patching, delaying the process.

Once they finally lowered the ROV into the water, the crew gathered around a shell of monitors near the galley, and Haberstroh grabbed her joystick. On one of the screens, the video feed of the ROV descending into Puget Sound looked interstellar, with specks in the water flying by. The stream would soon show the sea anemones obscuring the hull of the Dix. But earlier, on an adjacent gold-and-black sonar image, the shape of the ship had appeared in remarkably recognizable form.

The group won’t be pulling anything off this ship, he explained. Unlike the Pacific, which is in international waters, he’s seeking protection for the Dix from the state legislature. His interest is in securing what could be a mass grave site from recreational divers poking around.

It’s not Hummel’s only preservation project. A few years after Rockfish launched, Hummel and McCauley started the nonprofit Northwest Shipwreck Alliance, to “bridge the gap between local and regional nonprofit historical organizations/museums and the technology and expertise required to discover, recover, and preserve shipwreck artifacts and other important submerged historical resources.” Aside from the gold, everything found on the Pacific and other wreck sites would belong to the nonprofit, which aims to build a museum along the Seattle Waterfront.

Hummel named his friend McCauley, the history buff who’d first handed him a copy of Lewis and Dryden’s Marine History of the Pacific Northwest, and who’s back in the Seattle area serving as vice president of the Kirkland Heritage Society, president of the organization.

“These little pieces of the past are spread around our environment, and they’re hidden from everybody,” says Hummel. “But my job is to reveal those things to, not just myself, but to everybody—to share that. And that’s what really inspires me.”

Williams, who knows Hummel and McCauley but isn’t involved in their projects, supports the idea of a nonprofit leveraging a company’s resources to secure regional treasures for the public. But the arrangement does highlight the sometimes adversarial relationship between commercial divers and scholarly marine archaeologists, who might prefer the wreck be left alone entirely. “There are some underwater archaeologists who would be like, ‘I’m never speaking to Matt or Jeff because they’re nothing but treasure hunters,’” says Williams. “I think what they’re doing is pretty amazing because it wouldn’t get done otherwise.”

James Delgado, a former executive director with the Vancouver Maritime Museum and director of maritime heritage with NOAA, who’s studied the Pacific, hopes the work is done in the larger public interest. He’s seen well-intentioned treasure hunters get led astray. “Sometimes the quest for the gold,” he says, “can overtake the quest for knowledge.”

One fall morning, as the waves wobbled his creaky boat off the coast of Washington, Hummel hurried up the narrow stairwell from his sleeping quarters to the main cabin.

He was the only one awake. After yet another 18-hour day on yet another week-long search for a steamship that disappeared 146 years earlier, he understood why the rest of the crew wasn’t exactly raring to go. But the normally measured Hummel was excited. During the constant stream of ocean scans the previous day, he’d seen flashes of promising sonar images. The group had brought its equipment closer than ever to a potential wreck site, somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 feet below the water’s surface a little west of the Olympic Peninsula. Like a football coach reviewing game film, Hummel couldn’t wait to pore over the higher-resolution shots.

He shuffled over to the monitors next to the kitchen. Objects captured on sonar often look as amorphous as bacteria under a microscope. But at such a close range, Hummel recognized some details of the steamer. He noticed, for instance, the ship’s stringers—longitudinal supports that fortify the hull. From his research, he knew they should be exactly 36 inches apart on the 223-foot boat. He measured the gaps between the wooden pieces on the screen, checked his math, and then, just for a moment, allowed himself to revel in the thrill of discovery.

This is it, he thought. He showed the next crew member to wake what he’d found. Then, almost immediately, he regretted it.

On another glance, the structure seemed too long and narrow to be part of the Pacific. And where was the rest of the wreck? Subsequent passes over the site didn’t confirm anything. Soon, as it often did in the Graveyard of the Pacific, the weather went to hell. As the crew prepared to complete its final survey, a storm threatened to damage the boat. The SeaBlazer would have to turn back for the last time that season. All winter, Hummel would stew over how many dots were left to connect.

There wasn’t one eureka moment for Hummel. The sonar images that he’d seen during the fall of 2021 had given him hope, but after a winter of reviewing the data, his next voyage in the summer of 2022 only raised more suspicion that what he’d seen was a rock.

Still, he knew he was looking in the right area. While he was working in the marine navigation systems industry, he’d asked commercial fishers at trade shows whether they’d ever pulled in any coal. The Pacific was reportedly carrying some.

One time, a guy said his brother, a fisherman in the Westport area, had caught some in his trawl net. Hummel procured a piece of it to send to a geologist on Vancouver Island for analysis. She told him it came from Coos Bay, Oregon—where, Hummel soon learned, the owners of the Pacific owned the largest coal mine in town.

That fishing vessel must have crossed paths with the Pacific, Hummel thought. He’d retrace the 17-mile path the crew dragged its net that day. He didn’t see anything on sonar, but there was one area—a mile and a half by a quarter mile, the size, roughly, of the Mercer Island floating bridge complex, he reasoned—that their equipment could not reach. The ship had to be there, he thought.

They kept dropping the ROVs down in 2022, finding clues that gave them confidence but no certainty. Between expeditions, Hummel would review data on shore, where crews always learned more away from the throes of the sea. McCauley remembers Hummel asking him to come look at images, just as they’d reviewed McCauley’s side-scan sonar images of Lake Washington back in the day. “‘Yeah, I think that’s it. I think it could be.’ You sit and you twist and you turn,” McCauley says.

About 150 meters from what the crew thought might be the rest of the wreck, the ROVs found two apostrophe-shaped items on the bottom of the ocean—likely the paddle wheels that propelled the boat. From his research, Hummel knew they’d fallen out minutes before the rest of the ship sank, which explained their distance from the hull.

The crew thought the rest of the debris field would be in the direction of the wheels. Instead, they learned, the current had carried lighter objects to the other side of the main wreck site. The wheels, main wreck site, and debris field had all settled in a straight line at the bottom of the sea. “It all works. You connect the dots, and it’s like, oh, yeah—it connects perfectly with the history,” Hummel says.

Rockfish had to provide proof they’d found the wreck in court. So Haberstroh used the ROVs to grab some worm-eaten wood samples and a portion of firebrick from the wreck. On November 23, 2022, United States District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled that Rockfish had exclusive salvage rights to the wreck. No other boat could dive within a 40-square-mile area around their discovery.

Hummel wasn’t too worried about it, anyway. Their most recent competition hadn’t come within 25 miles.

In a Seattle junkyard, a few shipping containers hold the secret to finding gold in the middle of the ocean. One morning earlier this year, Hummel drove his Honda from Fishermen’s Terminal over to “the farm.”

“We grow robots there,” Hummel explained beforehand.

The clandestine location of Rockfish’s headquarters allows the company to scan the ocean in privacy and work on its next generation of ROVs. These machines will be larger and sturdier than their predecessors but still possess enough dexterity to grab gold “pokes”—those pouches where miners kept their treasure—from the bottom of the Pacific, along with bigger hunks of the precious metal.

Ever-precise, Hummel won’t put a number on the gold’s potential worth. “The thing about the value of the ship is that everyone in my position always guesses wrong, so it doesn’t really matter,” he says. “I know that there’s enough cargo there to reward the people that have put the risk and the expense and the effort into it.”

An insurance company has laid claim to 1.6 percent of the gold cargo, but the rest of the revenue from the sale of the gold will go to Rockfish, divvied out in shares to investors, crew, and others who’ve helped along the way, like the fisherman who found the coal in his net. The crew will spend at least the next two years making trips to recover the gold and other artifacts from the ship. In the fall, it plans to embark on three two-week journeys to the Pacific with a film crew in tow. A potential TV show is in the works with MGM. “Everybody is in the gym,” says Hummel, getting ready for the cameras.

He and his childhood pal McCauley have already received some fanfare. In November, they visited the National Museum of World War II Aviation in Colorado Springs, where the Helldiver they pulled from Lake Washington four decades ago finally landed after changing hands a couple of times. Completely restored, the plane is scheduled to fly later this year. The Mercer Island High grads who’d saved it received a hero’s welcome. “They rolled out the red carpet for us,” McCauley says.

Hummel gets just as excited talking about the plane and a handful of other major salvages on the horizon as he does the gold. Among other projects, the Northwest Shipwreck Alliance plans to recover two more nineteenth-century vessels that sank near Cape Flattery, one a Japanese ship full of ceramic ware, the other a British warship—as well as coal cars from Lake Washington. If Hummel has his way, all will be housed in that waterfront museum.

But even as Rockfish and the Northwest Shipwreck Alliance work to preserve regional treasures for public consumption, nobody can deny that the more literal kind of treasure remains top of mind. Just before leaving the shipping container where Rockfish is building its next ROVs, Hummel gestured toward the corner where, in a spot that was easy to miss amid all the wires and batteries and blueprints, there was a black safe. “For the gold.”