Tuesday, Sept. 8, 11:38 a..m., by Susan Chambers, Staff Writer

For once, it was nice. Relatively speaking.

Monday at the New Carissa was free of fog. A north wind blew, but not too bad, and Titan Salvage crews working on the wreck got wet only a little bit.

Well, except for Salvage Superintendent Dave Grecho. He got soaked.

A couple teams of four guys made trips to the wreck to cut away holding pins, braces, caps, etc., so the 100-ton crankshaft could be lifted away.

But like the rest of the wreck, the crankshaft was being stubborn and cranky. It wasn’t yielding to torches, prying, cables, cranes or cussing.

Salvors worked on it all day Tuesday while a National Geographic team of three men filmed them cutting away metal. Visitors to the North Spit took pictures from the beach on one of the first days it was clear enough to see the barges from shore.

Three times, salvors visited the wreck with torches, sledgehammers and pry bars.

Eric “Rabbit” Hickey and Yuri “Tarantula” Mayani got hit by waves a couple times as they worked on the far end of the stern, the west end, in the deeper part of the ocean.

It wasn’t until later that Grecho had his turn.

Torch in hand, he was burning through metal like a knife through cheese - slowly, but surely. I don’t know if he saw the wave curling up and over the port side, but it looked as if it attacked him on purpose. Over and over, white water gave him a saltwater bath even through his thick, oil- and dirt-soaked work clothes.

“Did you hear me?” he said later.

For sure, he was cussing up a storm. I can’t blame him but it’s all part of the fun and games of working on the New Carissa. He sat on the south side of the Karlissa B barge later, heated by the sun, the steam rising off him like morning dew evaporating from grass.

No amount of cutting and torching was getting the crankshaft free.

Salvage Master Shelby Harris tried letting down on the port side of the stern, relaxing the anchor chains so the crane Big Red would have a better angle from which to lift the shaft.

That was a no-go.

By then the sun was starting to set. It was time to call it a day.

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Friday, Sept. 5, 11:38 a..m., by Susan Chambers, Staff Writer

Scraptopia is no more.

At least for now.

Titan Salvage was finally able to get a floating barge out to the site of the New Carissa shipwreck on this week, thanks to the Skookum tugboat. Salvors finally transferred heaps of steel off the Karlissas A and B and onto the floating barge.

Now there’s room to work.

The painstaking slow transfer process dragged on and on -- well into the early evening hours.

Salvor Mike Pacheco warned early in the day it could be a late night.

Most of it was nearly invisible from shore. Salvors spent their time in Scraptopia -- the bow of the Karlissa B barge, the side facing the ocean -- most of the day. The crane Big Red and the engine room on the Karlissa B blocked the view of Scraptopia from shore. Indications of progress came via the handheld radios each crewman has:

“Down on de wire, down on de wire, Bille-e-e,” Panamanian Yuri “Tarantula” Mayani could be heard saying in his distinctive accent.

Crane operator Billy Stender’s reply often was silent -- but visible instead. It didn’t take long for Big Red to swing right, a multi-ton hunk of steel and metal parts caught in its web of cable and chains.

Salvors on the Karlissa B cut and cut and cut some more. Holes had to be made for chains and hooks to pick up the big pieces. Often, an upside-down corner piece of hull was used as a catch-all, a garbage bin full of smaller metal fragments.

The weather, thankfully, was nice. The wind and ocean swells died down enough so waves weren’t sloshing over the deck of the floating barge.

I gave Titan Managing Director David Parrot a bad time about being gone. He’d returned to Florida for a few days and Tuesday was his first day back.

The project needs its good luck charm, I told him.

Parrot -- also called General Chaos or Captain Chaos -- wasn’t buying it. He just shook his head and laughed.

Regardless, it was a nice homecoming for him. He shook hands and said hello to each of the crewmen and spent a lot of time with visitors to the barges and with Salvage Master Shelby Harris.

Parrot and Harris said work this week will be concentrated on the engine. Its full  300-plus-ton weight must be trimmed so that Big Red can pick it up.

But northwest winds continue to beat the hull as salvor use its protection while they cut the engine. The hull is smaller, significantly lighter and resembles nothing of the behemoth that once rose out of the surf. The ship now looks like a dead beast whose best parts were sacrificed to turkey vultures and scavengers, not much more than a carcass.