IN SEARCH OF SUNKEN TREASURE

THE SS PACIFIC, WHICH SANK IN 1875, WAS THOUGHT TO HOLD A FORTUNE IN GOLD. ONE MAN SPENT DECADES LOOKING FOR IT.

- Nancy Macdonald

Shipwrecks tend to attract unusual characters. Jeff Hummel, who lives in the Seattle area, is a tall and lanky 58-year-old with the methodical disposition of an engineer-not a roguish, hard-living treasure hunter who dives for gold between beers. He is more scholar than salvor.

His calm bearing, however, belies a profound impatience. In his search for the SS Pacific, a steamship that sank somewhere off the coast of Washington state in 1875, some days would begin at 4:30 a.m. and he wouldn't make it home before 10 p.m. He managed costly equipment and impossible timelines, working with investors eager for a share of up to 6,000 ounces of gold-worth millions today that reportedly went down with the vessel.

Hummel and his friend Matt McCauley grew up hunting for a different kind of treasure in Lake Washington, east of Seattle, with a mask and snorkel. The pair met in a lifeguard training class in their first year of high school. Around the age of 19, McCauley, with Hummel's help, rebuilt a five-metre ski boat they hauled up from the bottom of the lake using flotation devices.

The pair showed enormous ingenuity in their salvage efforts. "We'd go around to gas stations to ask for their old air hoses, then splice them together," McCauley, now 58, explains. The hoses supplied air to the pair from a boat on the lake's surface during their dives.

In high school, Hummel and McCauley started talking in earnest about searching for the wreck of the Pacific, which had a mythic status among treasure hunters. But university, and then jobs, got in the way. McCauley moved to the East Coast. Hummel, who designed maritime navigational software, stayed in Seattle, pecking away at the mystery of the Pacific in every spare moment.