First of all, South American mahogany is hard and not afraid of water, and it will not get worse and rot after soaking for a long time, and the sailboat made from it, if properly maintained, will be no problem for a hundred years. Secondly, South American mahogany is not deformed, whether it is cold or hot, its change is very small, the ship made with it will not be old and leaky, there is no need to use hemp mixed with asphalt to fill the cracks, and the cabin is also relatively dry, suitable for long-distance travel to transport some more valuable, afraid of moisture items.

Finally, South American mahogany is not afraid of insects, there are several insects on land that love to gnaw wood, such as termites, borers and other things, once there are them in the wood, it will be finished, and it will soon be bored with holes. There is also a knack in the sea that belongs to the shellfish class called ship maggots. Its larvae are very small and have large needle tips, and once they attach themselves to the wood, they will burrow into it and never come out for the rest of their lives, living by eating wood. It is simply a termite on the sea, and the wooden boat attached to it will be finished in a year or two. In order to prevent this kind of ship maggots, the human beings can be regarded as painstaking, and they have applied asphalt and poison, and the British have also covered the bottom of the ship with a layer of copper to prevent them from penetrating.

But boats made of South American mahogany are not afraid of ship maggots, I don't know if the wood is too hard, or the taste is not delicious, anyway, ship maggots never drill South American mahogens. In this way, although the price of a galleon made of South American mahogany is more than double, it is very worry-free to maintain later. It's a bit like buying a car now, some cars have a low price, but they break every three or five times, the accessories are not cheap, and it is enough to buy a new one just by repairing the car after a few years. Some cars too. The price is high, but the quality is good and the leather is solid, and you can drink any oil. Don't love bad, open worry-free.

In fact, Hong Tao thinks that this knowledge is more cost-effective than those gold coins, if he didn't follow Jim and them to explore the treasure, and if he didn't meet soil experts like the Puyol brothers, he might not know that there were ship maggots in the sea for the rest of his life, and he might not know that there were marines in Spain in the 17th century, let alone how difficult it was to find things at the bottom of the sea. Don't talk about finding a car. Even if a large ship hundreds of meters long sinks, it is difficult to find without exact coordinates. Even with advanced equipment, many times it is not very useful.

Hobbies are motivation, and if everyone in the world can do what they love, then the level of human productivity will have to be greatly improved. If it's fishing. Hong Tao can sit by the water all day without leaving his chair. If they had studied the scraps they had fished up, the Puyol brothers and Jim would have been able to work until late at night without feeling tired. If Hong Tao hadn't threatened them to turn off the power if they didn't go to sleep, they would probably have to stay up all night watching the bubbles in the electrolytic cell.

Early the next morning, before Hong Tao's breakfast was finished, Jim rushed up to him again to ask for a pilot, and while Hong Tao was still lying on the bed and snoring, the Puyol brothers had already found a plank from the aft of the ship from the electrolyzer. The above motif proves that it is a fragment of a Spanish galleon from the 17th and 18th centuries. With this plank, plus those clay pots like pickle jars. Everyone agreed that it was no problem to apply for an excavation permit.

This is good news, Hong Tao must support, so Rada left the Mouse Superman with Jim in a helicopter and flew towards Santiago, dozens of kilometers away. The rest of the ship could not be idle, and Dan, who was on crutches, and his nephew Dan, with the crew assigned to them by Hong Tao, began to prepare the equipment for salvage. According to Jim and Puyol's estimates, the amount of salvage work this time is very large, even if there is only one shipwreck, the things on it are very rich, and there is a modern shipwreck on top of the shipwreck, so it has to be moved away before the real shipwreck below can be successfully salvaged.

At this time, Hong Tao began to thank Levin and Amundsen again, if it weren't for the two of them teaming up to pit themselves and get such a lot of seemingly unusable equipment, they would have been blinded. Now, there are large compressors that can blow away the sediment layer on the seabed, and there are large sediment pumps that can suck objects on the seabed directly through a 30 cm diameter tube, which saves a lot of work. The small items do not need to be searched for at the bottom of the sea, and are pumped into the aft tank on the second deck along with the sediment, and arranged for a few people to find them slowly, and the rest of the waste is dumped back into the sea, like a dredger.

With the helicopter as a quick means of transportation, Jim returned to the Mouse Superman that evening with the excavation permit, and then took his team members to check the excavation equipment again, and returned to the cabin to rest until midnight.

Ten days before Christmas, the Mouse Superman began to move slowly towards the salvage site. Although the water is deep enough, there are too many reefs, and an ordinary 10,000-ton giant ship would not be able to approach such a complex sea area. However, the Mouse Superman is not an ordinary ship, it has six all-round drives, not only can move forward and backward at will, but also can pan left and right, as long as the pilot's skill is good enough, it can even drive diagonally, or spin in a circle in place without moving.

Under the command of patrol boats and small submarines, the Mouse Superman shook its huge body, moved itself to the appropriate sea area little by little, and after anchoring, it was not successful, and it had to rely on the all-round drive to constantly adjust the position of the hull to resist the impact of the current, so that the hull could be stabilized in a basically fixed state, so that the pipe of the pump could be put down, and the water flow with different pressures could be used to wash the seabed, remove the sediment layer on the surface, and then start the formal excavation work.

Holding a thigh-thick tube and scouring the seabed at the designated position is a very hard job. Divers have to stabilize their bodies in the currents and overcome the reaction force from the tubes. Even a professional diver like Dan, wearing professional diving equipment, can only work for half an hour in a row and then have to come up and rest for an hour, which is too physically demanding. Jim and Dan's nephews also had to go into the water together, taking turns working with the pipes, but the progress was still slow. After a busy day, the three of them were so tired that they couldn't hold knives and forks, and the area cleared out was less than one-tenth of the total area.

"I think it's not only inefficient, but it will also wear out your body, so isn't there a quicker way to do it? For example, let me drive a small submarine down to control those tubes, you and Dan only need one person to guide me underwater. Also, I took a closer look today, and the wreck above should allow it to roll half a circle to the west, so that the place below it will be free. Looking at Jim and Dan, who were almost tired, Hong Tao began to think of bad ideas again. He never likes to walk through the door of the dignified house, as long as he can achieve the ultimate goal, he doesn't think it's wrong to climb over a wall or climb a window.

"It's hard, the current down there is very fast, and with the strength of the water pipes, how can your submarine stabilize in one place? If the water pipes are in the wrong place, it is possible to wash away a lot of valuable items and rebury them under the mud and sand. For safety reasons, Jim didn't quite agree with Hong Tao's suggestion.

"That's how the excavation work is, you don't think it's slow, right? If it weren't for this kind of large-scale equipment, the workload would have been a week today!" Dan was also not satisfied with Hong Tao's behavior as a layman who wanted to command insiders.

"Tell me, how are you going to turn this wreck to the west?" Levine has also become half a treasure hunter these days, at least he can take various sections of the seabed and help everyone figure it out.

"I'll answer Mr. Jim's question first, I'm sure I'll have a way to hold the submarine in place. First of all, this submarine is the same as this ship, the power system is very special, and it can adjust its attitude in all directions, but it is a bit power-consuming to do so, if only the snorkel was not broken. Secondly, the submarine has two robotic arms, and I can grasp a certain part of the wreck with the short one, like a human hand, grasp the handrail with my left hand, stand still with the drive, and then hold the water pipe with my right hand. In any case, the power of the manipulator is greater than anyone present, and the main thing is that in addition to the need for electricity, it will not get tired or need to rest, it can work for at least three hours in a row, come back and change to a new battery, and you can set off again. I have three sets of batteries here, and the charging time is 12 hours, which means that my submarine will work at least 9 hours a day, and if necessary, it will work at night. Hong Tao likes to argue with others, whether he is right or wrong, anyway, in the end, he can always gain something. Even if you are wrong, knowing how and where you are wrong is still a gain.

"If that's the case, I think you can try, if you can really stabilize your posture at the bottom of the sea, it will help us a lot, and the cleanup progress can be at least tripled!"

"Well, let's test it on the side of the wreck tomorrow, and if the submarine can really replace the diver, then we'll be so happy! However, I don't think it's safe to use machinery, so it's best to clean up less when cleaning up sediment to prevent any accidents, safety first!" Jim felt that what Hong Tao said also made sense, since he could work with machinery, why should he be so tired, and Dan agreed, and he was willing to try. (To be continued......)