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January 10, 2005

Under the sea | Dave Jourdan sees a business in deep-sea search and salvage

By Sean Donahue
Pretty much anything can show up for sale on the online auction site eBay. Consider the recent auction of a few drops of water from a cup purportedly sipped by Elvis himself, or the grilled cheese sandwich bearing the image of the Virgin Mary. In that environment, you'd be forgiven if you dismissed Dave Jourdan as another crackpot for his December auction of four spots aboard an upcoming expedition to the South Pacific in search of Amelia Earhart's plane.

But in this case, Jourdan's fundraising and publicity-generating technique may have obscured the fact that he's not running a fly-by-night operation. Instead, Jourdan is a Navy veteran with a 20-year track record of finding historically significant underwater wrecks. With his first company, Maryland-based Nauticos Corp., he located a World War II-era Japanese sub and the Dakar, an Israeli submarine sunk in a 1968 accident, among other finds. Those projects helped him build Nauticos Corp. into 50-person operation before selling it to Texas-based Oceaneering International, a larger marine services company, in 2003.

Now, Jourdan has started over with a new company called Nauticos LLC, based out of his home in Cape Porpoise, to continue the search for Earhart's Lockheed Electra, which disappeared in 1937. It's a project Jourdan began working on in 1998, but which has suffered the loss of one set of financial backers and an equipment failure that cut short a 2002 expedition.

Picking up where that trip left off, Jourdan plans in March to return to a 1,000-square-mile area where he believes the plane went down ˆ— an expedition that will cost about $1.5 million. But as his eBay experiment suggests, financing an undersea search can be a tough sell. "You often run into two kinds of people ˆ— those who perceive that the risks are too high and reject you out of hand, and those that don't think there are any risks and go out and squander all kinds of money trying to do it themselves," says Jourdan. "I've always had a legitimate, profit-making business, but it's still very hard to find people to invest in it."

Welcome to the unusual and sometimes murky world of deep-sea search and salvage, where scientists and marine archeologists cross paths with treasure hunters, and expeditions to find historic wrecks share the seas with dubious quests for lost Nazi gold. For Jourdan, who says he has never been interested in treasure hunting, mounting his historical searches presents a business dilemma: In order to raise money, he still must convince investors there's a chance for a payoff, typically the potential for salvage of other valuable materials, media rights or, in the case of Earhart's plane, exhibition opportunities.

Assuming he can find the plane, Jourdan's goal is to raise the wreckage, partner with a conservation organization like the Smithsonian Institution to preserve it, then use it to create a traveling exhibition of Earhart's life. That vision helped convince at least one of his financial backers, venture capitalist Jon Thompson of Germantown, Tenn.

During the 1990s, Thompson helped bring to Memphis huge exhibits displaying artifacts from Catherine the Great's reign and relics from the Titanic; he is convinced an Earhart exhibit could be a "blockbuster." But it was Jourdan's reputation that ultimately convinced Thompson to put money into the project and sign on as exhibition consultant. "He had such an incredible track recordˆ… and when I looked at all of those things and met [the expedition's] people, I was really overwhelmed," says Thompson, who declines to say how much he invested in the project. "There are not that many experts in this field, so [Jourdan's team is] among a very select group of folks."

Ambition, not obsession
Jourdan's fascination with science and exploration began during his childhood (he remembers waking up at four in the morning to watch Mercury program rocket launches). He enrolled in the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and upon graduation satisfied his curiosity by joining the submarine service. "I saw it as an analogue to space exploration because in some ways the ocean bottom is a lot less explored than the near reaches of space," says Jourdan.

Following his service, he worked at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore for a Navy ocean engineering program, where he began to develop re-navigation, a search technique that combines historical records research with computer navigation analysis to determine the likely course of a ship or plane before it disappeared.

He founded Nauticos Corp. in 1986, and used re-navigation to helped find a Japanese sub, the I-52, in 1994, and in 1999 to find the Dakar and wreckage of Japanese aircraft carriers destroyed during the Battle of Midway. During the 90s, an entire industry of private treasure hunters and undersea search companies was growing thanks in part to the end of Cold War, which made certain types of underwater scanning technologies available to private companies for the first time.

That growth worries some marine scientists, though, who say valuable historic and scientific data can be lost if wreck sites aren't treated carefully. "There certainly is a role for private industry or individuals to get involved with maritime exploration, but there are a lot of different groups out there," says Jeremy Weirich, a marine archeologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of Ocean Exploration. "We see shipwrecks as a non-renewable marine resource, like coral reefs, and we like to see them treated appropriately."

Jourdan says his long-term goal is to work alongside government agencies and academic researchers to help develop sustainable deep-ocean research and commercial activities, such as searching for organisms with biomedical potential. Jourdan admits it will take years to establish such a program, but sees high-profile expeditions like the Earhart search as a way to catch the public's attention and help prove there's commercial value in the deep ocean.

Launching those expeditions, however, entails huge financial risk. Leasing an appropriate ship ˆ— which costs about $1,000 an hour to run ˆ— will consume about half the $1.5 million budget, says Jourdan. Then there's the cost of renting specialized sonar equipment and remote-controlled vehicles, which can run anywhere from $5,000 to $12,000 a day. That's why he decided to auction off extra berths on the ship to curious potential passengers for $80,000 to $250,000 each.

In the end, Jourdan didn't receive any bids on his eBay auction, but he's since lined up enough prospective backers to feel confident the expedition will leave on schedule in March. But no amount of financing can overcome the risk that Jourdan may not find Earhart's plane.

Still, he insists the search is worthwhile even if the plane doesn't turn up, since he'll be mapping a section of the Pacific sea bed that hasn't been studied before. He's also happy to continue developing Nauticos LLC, as well as the SeaWord Foundation, his nonprofit education organization.

Earhart's plane, he says, is just an ambition, not an obsession. "I've been happy to have both an interesting technical job and to run a successful business that led to some progress in this area of unknowns," says Jourdan. "You can't ask for a better opportunity than that."

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