Bryan Burrough: The Legacy Sails Away
Regular Vanity Fair readers may recall a piece I did back in January 2007
concerning a mammoth sailing yacht, the Legacy, that had gotten itself
hopelessly marooned on the salt flats just outside the harbor at Key West,
Florida. Well, it's taken more than two years, but the yacht has finally
been floated free.

It all started back in October 2005, when Hurricane Wilma wrenched the
158-foot Legacy from its moorings and tossed it into a federal sealife
sanctuary, where it stuck in the mud like a majestic marine statue. (At low
tide the water barely covered my ankles.) The ship's owner, Florida
businessman Peter Halmos, got into a prolonged tussle with Washington
bureaucrats over the best way to salvage it without damaging the surrounding
salt flats. In the meantime, Halmos and his crew rented a group of
houseboats, lashed them together, and anchored a mile away, taking up
permanent residence in Man O' War Channel to protect his ship.

After two years of arguing, everyone finally agreed on a salvage plan this
winter. A company named Byrd Salvage brought in a barge, the Helen B., which
used two 80-ton pulling cables to drag Legacy off the flats into open water.
To minimize damage to the sanctuary, enormous underwater pumps were used to
belch sand and mud into the trench the yacht created as it lurched along its
three-mile journey through a line of special "turbidity" curtains, which
prevented all that churned-up sediment from spreading across the flats.
Legacy finally floated free on February 25.

The original Vanity Fair story sparked a flurry of follow-up articles around
the world, but Legacy's removal has gone mostly unnoticed outside Key West.
For now, the yacht remains anchored offshore. Halmos, who was planning to
search for a sunken Spanish galleon at the time of his shipwreck, remains in
his self-styled "Aqua Village," happily laying plans to refit the ship.
Knowing Peter, a hardheaded, ambitious sort, he'll be up and running and
looking for treasure again before you know it.