The weather was “absolute snot,” to use the words of Titan Salvage Master Shelby Harris, but nevertheless, the New Carissa is 205 tons lighter.

On Saturday the winds were blowing about 45 mph and the waves were as big as 8 feet, but Titan still managed to remove more than 200 tons of the wreck’s engine.

It was cold, wet, foggy and downright miserable by many standards — the wind chill was 42 degrees — but salvage crews dressed for the weather in thick, heavy clothes, gloves and rain gear. The beach was invisible thanks to the fog. Salvors were anxious to watch the engine be removed.

The weather headache worked indirectly in Titan’s favor. The crew had been lifting the remains of the New Carissa, but the big waves coming in turned the stern section into a hydraulic sail that would slam up and down with the surf. Harris decided to put the propeller end back into the water and lift the other. The move enabled the crew to work on the engine. Back in the water, the far stern end acted as a more stable breakwater, he said.

For a few days prior to the big lift, torch teams had been cutting off smaller slices of the engine to bring it down to a more manageable weight for the Big Red crane. The crane sits on the Karlissa B barge and the engine was on the bow end of the wreck. The distance from the crane to the engine puts a lower limit on the amount of weight the crane can handle.

The big piece took a few hours to rig and lift. It weighed 170 tons. Harris estimates there is another 150 tons remaining of the engine.

“We had to separate the main engine in half to lift at that distance,” he said.

Salvors first started pulling the engine with one anchor chain hooked to a puller, just to break it loose. Chains creaked and clanged. Faint pops could be heard through the fog.

Crews using cutting torches made a clean slice through the crank case earlier in the week. On Saturday, the engine first dropped down and separated as the anchor chain was slowly released. The crank shaft soon became visible. Then the puller started cranking up, pulling the No. 2 anchor chain link by link.

On the stern of the Karlissa B barge, the end facing the now invisible beach and the wreck, salvors hung out by the railing, watching, waiting. Some pulled out pocket digital cameras or camera phones and snapped pictures as the top of the engine rose ever so slowly.

Soon, it was time to transfer the engine to the Big Red crane so it could be lifted and placed on the bow of the Karlissa B — but the engine was hung up on a corner of a piece of the wreck.

Harris, dressed in coveralls for the day’s hands-on work instead of his usual heavy red jacket, and other crewmen traveled to the wreck in the yellow basket. They inspected the hang-up, then decided to send Yuri Mayani and Salvage Superintendent Dave Grecho to the wreck to cut away the stubborn metal still clinging to the engine.

Once that was done, and the engine hooked to Big Red, salvor Mike Pacheco used a cutting torch to slice through a link on the anchor chain holding the engine to the puller. The big chain clanked away, clunking down the wreck in small crash of metal and rust.

Titan Managing Director David Parrot watched from the Karlissa B as the crankshaft became exposed.

“Look at that,” Parrot said, shaking his head. “No water.”

The crank case was dry. No oil, no water, no nothing — even after sitting below the surface of the Pacific Ocean for nearly a decade.

Jesse Harris manned the controls of Big Red. He slowly inched up on the cables, lifting, holding, and lifting again, listening to his brother Shelby Harris and other crewmen as they watched the engine begin to rise. Harris swung the crane around, engine attached, to the west, where crews used ropes to guide the engine through blowing fog to its place on the bow of the Karlissa B.

Then they called it an early day.

With the Oct. 1 deadline looming, Harris was glad to see some progress on the engine.

“It’s pretty much what we consider the heart,” Harris said.

Moving a big chunk of it out is a good feeling for him. Harris said the pulling, cutting and eventual removal of the engine went according to expectation.

“It’s just nice when something goes the way you planned,” Harris said.

The crew was busy Sunday re-rigging what little is left of the New Carissa for more pulling and steadying the barges for more rough weather to come.