As we began to cruise back to the boat ramp where the deputy had left the trailer, Craig turned to me and asked, “You sweating?”

I checked and found my skin dry. Strange, I thought, since the atmosphere was like a steam bath. “No,” I answered.

“I noticed I’d stopped a half hour ago. I don’t think that’s good.”

“We’re dehydrated.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

By the time we reached the ramp and had helped the deputy load the boat on the trailer, the inside of our mouths felt as if they had been filled with talcum powder. Our faces were sunburned, and our eyes had the vacant look of men dying of thirst in the desert. Climbing into the superheated car that had been left in the sun only made things worse. We were about to stop at a house to ask the owner if we could drink from a garden hose when I gasped and pointed to a Circle K convenience store on the next corner.

“There!”

Craig hurtled the car into the parking lot. We jumped out and ran inside almost before it stopped moving. This being 1989, there was no such thing as cold bottled water as there is today. The only water for sale then was distilled in plastic gallon jugs. We snatched the biggest cups we could find and filled them to the rim at the soda fountain. Downing them in seconds, we again held them under the spigots for seconds. We had become almost completely dehydrated.

“Hey,” the clerk yelled at us, “you can’t do that.”

Craig, a reasonably large man, scowled at him. “When we’re done, charge what you will. We’re dying here.”

The clerk nodded and backed off. He’d probably assumed, judging by our bedraggled appearance, that we couldn’t pay. When we’d finished at last, Craig handed him a ten-dollar bill. “Keep the change, and buy the next thirsty travelers a drink.”

After a cool shower in our air-conditioned rooms, we met for dinner and discussed the day. Nature and man had thrown every obstacle in our path. We hadn’t really expected to find New Orleans the first time out. That rarely happens. But we had not expected such a tough project in searching for a ship we knew we could pinpoint within a rectangle the size of a football field.

It was time to head for the old corral and do some homework.

We now went back to the basics and overlaid old charts with new ones. The shoreline since the building of the levee seemed vague. From what we could conclude, the bank had receded over the years. But how far?

Then, a few months later, we received a report from the Army Corps of Engineers that came within a hair of halting the search in its tracks. In 1971, during a project to strengthen the levee, they’d laid an articulated concrete mattress along the bottom of the levee just below the waterline. The mattress contained iron rebar inside and hinges made of steel. This is what had given us our continuous mag reading near the west bank. It appeared that the mattress had been laid directly over what was once Clay’s Landing.

This dilemma, combined with the steel barges, docks, and pipelines along the shore, made it impossible to detect any remains of New Orleans. With a sinking heart, I put the search data in the file marked “Improbable” and turned my thoughts to other lost ships.

Three years later, I was at a cocktail party when I was introduced to a fan of my books. I hate myself for not remembering his name, but we never made contact again. He was an older gentleman with a bald head rimmed with white hair, and deep-blue eyes behind rimless spectacles.

During the course of the conversation, he mentioned that he lived in West Baton Rouge parish. I mentioned our work there on the Arkansas and New Orleans, and we talked a bit about the history of the Mississippi. He had been diving in the river off and on for many years, a feat most divers from Louisiana or Mississippi don’t care to experience. He regaled me with stories of being dragged more than a mile underwater by the four-knot current and of suddenly meeting up with an eight-foot-long, five-hundred-pound catfish in the murky water. He also talked about a strange phenomenon: once you reach a depth of eighty feet, the water visibility suddenly turns from two feet to a hundred feet.

At his urging, I described my search for New Orleans in more detail, narrating our failure to find her.

He looked at me and smiled. “You didn’t look in the right place.”

I hesitated, wondering what he had in mind. “We had Clay’s Landing pegged to within a hundred yards,” I argued.

“Not the right direction.”

“Where would you have us look?”

He leaned back, sipped from his scotch and water, and peered over his glasses. “Certainly not up and down the bank.”

“Where else could it be?” I asked, my interest mushrooming.

“Out in the river. Since I was a boy, the west bank has receded anywhere from two to three hundred yards. Clay’s Landing must be way out in the river.”

I digested that for a few seconds as the revelation began to build and flood inside my mind. “Then it’s beyond the concrete mattresses.”

“Way beyond.”

Suddenly the siren’s call of New Orleans began to sound again. Thanks to this chance encounter with a stranger at a Telluride cocktail party, we’d been given a second chance at finding the first steamboat on the river.

In August of 1995, we tried again. Why do we always go south in August? After excavating a wreck off Galveston that we hoped would be the Republic of Texas Navy ship Invincible but were unable to positively identify, Ralph Wilbanks, Wes Hall, Craig Dirgo, my son Dirk Cussler, and I headed to Baton Rouge with Diversity and all the equipment in tow. After arriving and losing a small wad of hard-earned cash on a riverboat casino, we turned in for the night. High rollers that we are, our combined losses came to all of thirty dollars. It might have been more, but I think Ralph actually made a couple of bucks. Interestingly, under Louisiana law, the riverboat cannot dock along the shore but must move along rails attached to the keel in the water. I guess that by using that ploy, the esteemed state legislators can claim that the evils of gambling do not touch sacred Louisiana soil.

Before launching the search, Ralph and I interviewed several of West Baton Rouge parish’s senior citizens. They all agreed that during their lifetimes the river had eaten away the west bank, and the present shoreline was three hundred yards west. The next morning, we found a ramp beneath the bridge spanning the Mississippi River and launched Diversity.

We began mowing the lawn of the search grid, beginning almost in the center of the Mississippi and working toward the west bank. We ran very tight lines, using both the magnetometer and the sidescan sonar. The day went slowly. Thanks to Ralph and his big ice chest, Craig and I did not become dehydrated again.

Six hours later, we had covered the entire search grid three times. Except for a few minor hits, the mag had recorded nothing worth pursuing. The sonar had found a target at about the right distance from shore, but it was a good two hundred yards downriver from the southern boundary of what had been Clay’s property.

Because we were running out of time, and everyone had commitments back home, we decided to return and investigate the target another time. And since none of us was experienced at diving in a muddy river with a four-knot current, we thought it best to line up and work with local divers who were more knowledgeable about the local conditions.

We were in an optimistic mood now that we had a target in the general area. Sadly, we abruptly met with another disappointment.

As we were pulling in the mag and sonar sensors, we watched, stricken, as a huge Army Corps of Engineers dredge came down the river, its buckets digging deep into the mud of the river and depositing it into barges. Though it missed our target by a good hundred yards, we could not help but wonder if this had been the ultimate fate of New Orleans.