SITE OF THE NEW CARISSA — You can’t judge a ship by its rust.

To a visitor gliding in on a suspended cable car, much of the New Carissa looks like a hopelessly deteriorated rust bucket. Saltwater has battered the outside, eating away the paint and outer steel surface.

But the dissected chunks of superstructure waiting on the deck tell a different story. Cutting torches have turned some of the metal on the edges blue, but the rest is clean and rust-free.

During a press visit on Thursday, Titan Salvage’s managing director, David Parrot, pointed to the walls of one of the cut-off pieces. The outside was weathered, but the majority of the three-quarter-inch wall was solid.

One of the first pieces removed was a multi-ton storage tank. The surprisingly clean white container towered over workers on the deck. It looked ready for service.

“That tank is as good as when it was new,” Parrot said. “It wasn’t going anywhere.”

Until now.

The New Carissa’s stern has protruded from the Pacific Ocean off the North Spit since 1999. The wood-chip transport vessel ran aground in February of that year, and though the bow was sunk offshore, the stern settle stubbornly at its current site.

Titan Salvage is removing the wreckage this summer, working from a pair of jacked-up barges, linked to the spit by a cable car capable of hauling 7 1/2 tons.

Salvaging the New Carissa has been all smooth sailing so far. So much so that Titan concluded two barges just weren’t enough. Soon a third -- this time a floating barge -- will crowd in on the removal-defying stern.

Parrot fears things may be going a little too smoothly. Just a few days into the cutting process, Parrot is waiting for the storm clouds to start gathering over the project.

“That is what is so scary,” Parrot said. “I would rather have a ton of headaches every day and still be able to move forward than have it be this easy.”

He isn’t so nervous that he won’t take advantage of an opportunity to make the enormous task a little easier. The original plan was to store all the New Carissa chunks on the decks of Titan’s Karlissa A and Karlissa B barges. But with nature offering a break from the usual furious summer wind and inhospitable surf, Titan will pull in the other barge to haul off pieces of the wreck.

Bringing in a third platform saves crews from having to work the night shift cutting the chunks removed from the wreck into storable pieces. Instead, the Karlissa B’s 350-ton-capacity crane will pluck the freshly cut pieces from the decks and transfer them to the floating barge. The barge will take the scrap to Empire, where it can be further processed and loaded onto trucks. Then portions of the rusting hulk will be hauled to a recycling facility yet to be determined.

Parrot hopes the third barge will be hauled out and ready to take some weight off the decks by sometime next week.

“That way we can store it all without having to infinitely process the pieces,” Parrot said.

Though outfitted like mountain climbers to work on the slanting stern, cutting crews are making good progress. Parrot estimates that all visual parts of the New Carissa will be gone in a couple of weeks.

Then comes the tricky part: raising the wreckage and cutting off pieces as they rise from the water.

Salvage Superintendent Dave Grecho said the difficult part will be when they get down to the engine room and areas with complicated structures. Grecho seems ready for the challenge. After emerging from a hole in the top of the wreck Thursday morning, he took off his hard hat, worn backward, then jumped up and down a few times smiling and laughing. It was lunchtime, but his enthusiasm never fades. He was the first one on the wreck when cutting started Monday.

When the members of the torch crew returned from lunch, they wouldn’t have much work left before a chunk on the top of the wreck and another on the front were ready for the cranes to carry them away.

“It will be about an hour’s worth of work,” Grecho said.

Then on to another slice of Carissa, and another.