Green paint, now yellowed from the sun, flaked off in tiny chunks on a constant basis from the side of the boat, much to Red's annoyance. Little things like that could bother him into an obsession, and for weeks now he'd been asking when Dot planned on pulling into port so he could repaint the green sharks. They'd had a few run-ins with officers looking for a boat of their description that had been stolen from the Bahamas years before but the green sharks always managed to keep the officer's suspicions at bay. From living many years in the islands, Red was a superstitious man, and knew that allowing the very things on your boat which protected you – the green sharks – to go to hell meant bad luck. So, perhaps it was more than the fear of the law that was making Red antsy for some green paint and a stretch of beach.
Dot, who had her own frustrations, had learned to ignore the ramblings about magical green sharks coming from Red and instead concentrated on her task, which so far was seven years old and getting no easier. The Charlotte was proving to be more elusive than originally thought, and life on a 60ft boat could wear thin at times. Scooby, her diver, and a few of his piratical-looking diving compatriots lived on the boat in addition to Dot and Red. She often thought they'd scoured the whole of the West Indies and still had come up short. Along the way, they'd found enough loot lying in the wrong locations to at least keep themselves fed and the boat gassed up, but the sites were never rich enough to warrant even considering the possibility of it being the Charlotte and so, as it has so many others in the Caribbean, treasure fever had taken over and they all vowed to never give up the hunt until she was found.
Scuba tanks lined the perimeter of the boat like guards standing watch over all of them. Scooby, a black and white cartoon cat who looked more faded than the boat, examined the O ring on his beat up, bright green tank and sighed. Tanks and equipment weren't meant to last forever and that's exactly what Dot wanted it to do. Scooby hooked up his tank to his gauges and first stage and checked the reading. Only 1500psi. That wasn't good. Calling the air pressure machine on board second hand would be doing it a favor – Scooby swore it had to be third or fourth hand. Even on the best days the damn thing only filled their tank to 2000psi instead of the safe level of 3000, and for dives like they were doing Scooby would have preferred a nice 5000psi. At the depth he and his divers were diving to today – around seventy five feet – he could only hope to stay down for a half hour; that was a liberal figure and would require them to breathe slowly and only when needed.
He spit into his mask and rinsed it out in the sea to keep it from fogging up on him when he was down. He whistled to his divers, who came out from the break room with their wet suits pulled up to their waists and chewing on the last of lunch. "Let's go guys," he said. They suited up, strapped tanks to their backs, marked their location on the map, popped their regulators in their mouths and leapt off the boat.
The first seconds after hitting the water weighed down with twenty pounds of scuba gear on is always disorienting, even to the best divers. Scooby waited patiently for this to pass, gave the "ok" signal to his partners, and began the slow ascent to the bottom. No matter how many times he dove, the sight of a dark ocean floor, fretted with predatory fish and shipwrecks lurking just under the sand always sent a chill up his spine. There was always a moment just after he jumped in when he wished he could jump out again, never to have to go down again. But he knew that a toon who could dive was rare, and so he was a hot commodity – something he hadn't been since the 1920's as toon royalty. Now no one even remembered who he was. The name "Scooby" instead conjuring up images of a big brown dog. He shuddered. He hated dogs.
Up on deck, Dot dropped anchor so as not to drift while the boys were under. She tossed her cigarette overboard and noted their location. They'd been there before.
Scooby held his waterproof metal detector out away from him and to an angle, hoping to pick up any stray signals. His divers went west while Scooby, following a strange hunch, followed the eastern line. Haunted by the low air supply and careful not to sup too much, he ran his detector over any and all depressions he came across. After twenty fruitless minutes, and frustrated by the 200psi left in his tank, Scooby prepared himself to go up. He'd have to allow for a decompression stop and so needed a bit of air for that. He swung the metal detector to his left side, trying to hook it onto his belt, but the metal latch would not unlock. He drifted with the light current, struggling with the stubborn latch, over to an enormous coral bed to his right. Suddenly his metal detector screeched to life. Scooby jumped (well, as well as one could while in water) and nearly dropped the regulator from his mouth. He took a look at his detector's gauges; they were pinned. Whatever this was, it was huge.
He pounded on his tank with a dive knife, alerting the other divers to where he was. It took three of them to scrape off a patch of coral enough to see the bronze gleam up at them. Scooby started; a bronze cannon! Those things were worth upwards of $4,000! He signaled his intentions to the other divers and, knowing they didn't have much air left, began to scrape as much of the stuff off as they could. Scooby's heart skipped a beat when he saw the engraving on the side:
HMS Charlotte
He would have laughed for joy if the telltale emptiness of his air tank hadn't made itself known at that moment; he rasped the last few breaths out of the tank while giving the signal for "up," snatched his emergency air supply canister (which gave him a few breaths of air), popped it in his mouth and came to the surface as slowly as he could without running out of air. They all broke the surface at about the same time and grinned at one another.
"Well?" Dot shouted from the deck.
"Boss," Scooby said, grinning ear from ear. "I think you'll be pleased."
Once the initial excitement of having found the Charlotte died down, Scooby, Dot and Red sat on the prow and began planning a course of action to raise the treasure. "Here's what I think happened to the ship, judging from what we saw down there," Scooby said, popping his cigarette in his mouth to free his hands. He drew a picture of a ship on water. "There must have been a storm, boss. There's no other way for her to have sunk in the position she's in unless she was hit by enemy fire, which we know she wasn't. The shoals she hit must have been those – " he pointed to a shallow flat about 500 yards away, " – and she must have been going fast enough to really get herself in trouble fast. She musta sunk like a ton of bricks, boss. And she sunk on her side. That's why there's all those cannons lined up on top of her, and also why her hull wasn't completely buried like most other shipwrecks. The hull and the bronze cannons have become a coral bed."
"Wait, bronze cannons?"
Scooby grinned. "Sure, boss. They were bronze cannons."
"Scooby, bronze cannons stopped being produced in the late seventeenth century because they exploded when they got too hot. Guys would be in the midst of battle and their own goddamn cannon would blow up in their face! Plus they were expensive to make."
"So what are you saying?"
"I'm saying that I'm having a hard time believing that an eighteenth century wreck has seventeenth century military equipment."
"Boss, we got positive identification. It says Charlotte right on the cannon."
"Look Dot, it only sank in 1718 – it probably wasn't made in the eighteenth century. It was probably made in the late seventeenth," Red said.
"You think so?" Dot said, eyebrow raised.
"Yeah," Red nodded.
"Dammit." Dot lit a cigarette. "Those seventeenth century wrecks are always harder to get to. They were better built and stood up better to getting smashed by reefs. I'll tell you what I think."
"What?" Scooby asked.
"I think we're going to have to blast the hell out of that coral to get to any treasure."
"Blast underwater?" Red cried. "How the hell are we going to do that?"
"We need a pyrotechnics expert," Dot said simply.
"Honey, where we gonna we get one of those?" Red said, gesturing to the wide ocean.
"Red, I've never failed you yet and I'm not gonna start now. Look, we're gonna pull into the nearest island. First, you're gonna paint me some green sharks for luck. Then I'm gonna hock the last of the treasure we've been saving for an emergency and I'm buying you a ticket to America. If there's anyone on earth who knows about things that explode, it's my brother, Wakko Warner. You're gonna find him and bring him back here to me, and we're gonna make some money." Dot smirked. "It's time for a family reunion..."