The most elusive thing I chased was the ghost of the SS Marigold. A tiny magnetic anomaly in a quiet stretch of the Gulf led me to a 3‑meter‑deep patch of driftwood and a rusted hull that had been hidden beneath a layer of sediment for over a century. The only clues were a single, corroded compass needle pointing north‑west and a fragment of a brass plate that read “Marigold.” I followed those scraps, trench by trench, until I finally saw the outline of the ship’s keel on a side‑scan sonar sweep. The patience paid off when I could finally read the story it had been hiding in the water.

It was a tired, scarred thing, the steel ribs almost entirely covered in salt crust and barnacle gardens. Where the hull was still intact you could see the old paint peeling off in waves, flaking into jagged green and blue flakes. The water around it had turned the whole thing a deep, almost black blue, and in the corners you could see where the plates had once joined, now just a loose knot of rust. It felt like the ocean had wrapped a blanket around it, but you could still see the ghost of the ship’s shape, like a faint, weathered map on the seabed.