Beneath The Surface

Sylvia Tervoort does not appear to be a salty, globe-trotting, toughas-nails phenom. There’s no sunburned visage, no vast distances in the eyes, no marinized baseball cap. Indeed, when I first caught sight of her last December in the parking lot of the Glynn Avenue McDonald’s in Brunswick, Georgia, I was slightly mystified. She was certainly a bit younger than I’d expected, but otherwise, although she’s Dutch and hails from a town just north of Amsterdam, she looked like your average American tourist—maybe a casually dressed professor or lawyer—hitting Mickey D’s for a quick bite before cranking up a pre-Christmas shopping spree amid the burgs and marshlands of Georgia’s Golden Isles.

But Sylvia was no tourist—not by a long shot. She was, instead, a Smit salvage master, an exceptionally rare breed of cat whose chosen milieu is maritime catastrophe—big, fat, radically expensive, radically complicated, radically high-profile and occasionally lifethreatening maritime catastrophe. But even more intriguing, she was at the time the only woman in the entire world doing such an extraordinary job. And she’d been hard at it in southern Georgia for approximately four months now, leading the charge on a huge, multifaceted project—the safe, environmentally responsible salvage of the M/V Golden Ray, a 660-foot Korean car carrier that had inexplicably capsized in nearby St. Simons Sound with 23 crew members, 4,200 Kia and Hyundai automobiles and 320,000 gallons of fuel oil on board.

She waited for me beside her little white rental car, smiling, with blondish hair, maybe a freckle or two, dressed in pink corduroy bell bottoms, running shoes, a lime-colored blouse and, in keeping with the briskness that offen characterizes the sunny South’s winter season, a loose black sweater jacket.

“Hello, Bill,” she said, slamming her car’s door.

“Finally, we meet in person,” I replied as we shook hands