World Photo by Susan Chambers No, that big chunk beneath the jack-up barge isn't the New Carissa. All that remains of the shipwreck is the scrap on the deck of a floating barge anchored near The Titan Salvage Karlissa A and B jack-up barges on Monday.

SITE OF THE NEW CARISSA — She’s outta there — and just in time, too, before a big storm hits.

The New Carissa is gone. Gone, gone, gone.

Titan Salvage crews on the Karlissa A and B barges and one on a floating barge worked into the late evening Monday removing New Carissa steel scrap from the jack-up barges to the floating barge.

It was a huge job. The main engine block alone weighed 170 tons. Other pieces weighed 105, 107, 120 tons or so.

The little pieces left in “Scraptopia” on the bow of the Karlissa B after the larger pieces were removed were thrown into makeshift scrap bins before being lifted to the floating barge.

One of the last pieces taken off the bow of the B was the propeller, attached shaft and miscellaneous metal. Sunlight glinted off the huge, nearly 20 feet in diameter, nickel-aluminum-bronze prop, in contrast to the light-absorbing, dark, dull, rusty pieces of the hull and engine, as it was lowered to the floating barge.

The plan still is to give the prop to the Coos County Historical and Maritime Museum, Titan Director of Engineering Phil Reed said. It will be the Bay Area’s permanent souvenir of the chip ship’s 1999 shipwreck.

The only thing left for Titan to do is to demobilize — and everyone, including Titan Logistics Coordinator Annette Harris, Salvage Master Shelby Harris, Reed, subcontractors and the nearly 20 salvors on the barges, will be working on that starting today.

Equipment must be stowed on the barges or welded to the decks. Fairleads, other heavy machinery and pullers must be lashed down, Reed said.

The Karlissa B, the one with the crane Big Red on it, will be the first to go.

It leaves today. At least, that’s the plan.

“If the weather allows, we’ll be jacking down the B,” Reed said. “It all really depends on the weather and how tough it is to get the legs out of the bottom.”

Titan crews will drop the barge deck down to the surface of the water, slowly, then lift one of the six legs out of the sand at a time, set it back down, lift another leg, and so on, until all six are pulled out.

“If they come nicely …,” Reed said, his voice trailing off, “and we have the Skookum (tug) hooked up …”

The A barge will take a little longer, since it is the one with much of the heavy machinery on it. It’s also the one attached to the shore via the cables that carry the cable car and the men to work every day.

A day or two of weather wouldn’t hurt, Reed said, and it will give salvors time to plan and work on the A and get it ready to go.

“One day is almost impossible,” Reed said. “We want to make sure when we cut our lifeline to shore, everything’s in place, because we’ll be back to using helicopters.”

But weather is going to be an issue soon. By Saturday, the first major southerly storm of the season is predicted to hit, bringing 16- to 17-foot swells with 7 feet of wind chop on top of them. It’s likely nothing the barge can’t handle — it’s jacked 50 feet in the air — but it will be impossible to jack down in that kind of weather.

Still, it won’t be long until the Titan crews are gone, on to another job somewhere else in the world.

The weather was good Monday for transferring scrap. The wind came up, but the swells weren’t huge and there were only a few whitecaps. The fog stayed offshore, threatening to close in, but slowly receding. Few tourists drove to the beach during the day and the only real visitors to see the last scraps transferred to the floating barge were the ones who have been there nearly every day: the gulls, the pelicans, the sanderlings and other shorebirds.

Then the New Carissa — what was left, anyway — sailed away into the proverbial sunset on a floating barge.