end zone . looking for sunken treasure off the marin county coast? we'll tell you about the 16th century ship that could lay buried there. a coast guard ship rounds up somalia pirates. we take you to the sky in a top- of-the-line russian fighter plane and get an american pilot's assessment. soviet-era technology. and a weapon of war takes on a mission of mercy. the world war ii lifesaving venture of the u.s. submarine,

all straight ahead "a second look". hello etch. i'm frank somerville and history is filled with stories of shipwrecks and lost treasure and filled with stories of adventures who set out to find the treas, braving the elements and offcoming obtalcs. there is a shipwreck lie laying somewhere off the coast of marin county and over the year it's been the quest of more than one adventure trying to find it. ktvu's john fowler met one of them. >> up the rugged coast a few miles lays one of the most important unrecovered treasiers of the new world. hidden in the midst, guarded by sharks and frigid water, there waits a fabulous prize, the end of a 4-century-old story. it was a stormy november, the year 1595. spanish explore sebastian

rodriguez anchored his galleon offshore from what we now call drake's beach. they claimed this land for spain, calling it the port of san francisco. suddenly a huge storm lupe, waves smashed the ship into the shallows and fortunately most of the crew survived and made it home, but their cargo, treasures from the orient remain here, virtually all of it still undiscovered. waves still occasionally wash ashare, tantalizing pieces of treasure, because because of the sharks, the cold water and difficulty of finding this wreck, no one has seriously searched for it until now. this man believes he knows right where there is gold, porcelain and a significant shipwreck under the sands of drake's bay. he has document proves it and a plan too bring it up and

salvaging in these dangerous water requires courageous and serious politicking and it's the adventure for bob marks who began looking for this wreck 40 years ago. >> i just came back from spain and i'm convince the documents that i read in the spanish archived that the ship capsized about a quarter mile offshore and some of the rig hing and masts went ashore, as we know from documents. the main part is laying out there in 40-50-feet of water and what we don't know is how much sediment is on it. the cold water oshould benefit the wreck and we could find even an intact hull there. >> we don't believe that objects once found to the st. augustine can be separated into private hands. they are public trust and secondly, we would like if more the technically details of his approach. >> reporter: officials are

expected to rule on the permit soon. previous searches for this wreck revealed numerous possible sites. bits of porcelain none to be aboard still come ashore. marks has come to survey more than the shark situation. >> the dive was great for a lot of reasons. first up, we didn't get eaten. that was pretty good. visibility is good, eight too twelve feet and it's soft silt, which means we could use bottom- profiling sonar. >> reporter: his plans to survey with the high-tech sonar is sound waves that can penetrate the silt, revealing shapes of timbers and cannons, crucial to richard the shipwreck, but salvage may be extremely difficult in these hostile conditions and marks' $3 million concept includes a

large bubble to be lowered over the wreck. pumped full of warm water, it should keep out sharks and keep divers comfortable while suction pumps do the work, but it will still be risky. a great white shark was gnawing on boats. marks now has more than money invested in this battle with bureaucracy, the predators and the sea. >> i will win in the end, i always do. >> reporter: marks may find the cargo offshore, but experts say the sunken treasure is only part of the mystery. >> more importantly he had a camp onshore and that is the second relatively unsung story here. >> reporter: kelly and others say survivors of the st.

augustine buried some of the valuables in that beach front camp and they claim know right where it is. a 2003 report from the area indicates that robert marks never did obtain federal permits to recover the st. augustine and in 1990, gave up trying. >> 1997 state and federal agencies put together a high- tech search project to among other things look for the wreckage of the st. augustine and fothe camp side where the shipwreck survivors lived before sailing south. they didn't find either one and the st. augustine remains listed as "unlocated." still drom on "a second look," how a coast guard boat came to fight pirates off the coast of somalia and what it takes to be a pirate-fighting armed guard on a merchant ship.

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when somalia pirate took over the misch it drew world war attention and it brought cheers when the captain was rescued. later that month a cutter from the bay area was involved in an incident, spotting a skiff that was tacking a merchant vessel. it launched its own high-speed over the horizon boat and in no time the pirates surrounded.

ten weeks later it arrived at its homeport in alameda. >> reporter: during its more than 40 years, the u.s. coast guard cutter has had many homecomings and they are always touching. >> i can see her walking now. >> i'm really happy. it's been a long time. six months too long. >> reporter: six months ways long time, longer than usual deployment, but in that time it

circumnavigated the globe. in the gulf of oman, south of iran, the crew rescue a drifting boat with no fuel and 27 dehydrated men on board. >> the government of oman received a thank you from the government of iran so that was kind of nice to get an indirect thank you for helping these stranded mariners. >> reporter: and the ship and crew trained with navies in pakistan and libya, the first u.s. ship to visit libya in 40 years. >> it was hot and dusty. >> reporter: but the most dangerous mission was anti- piracy, working with warships in the gulf of aden, where pirates seized a ship. >> once our helicopter overhead we were able to intercept them.

>> reporter: he says nothing smells quite like home. >> when you are out to sea from miles away, you can smell the redwoods. you can smell fresh seabreeze. it's a distinctly california smell. >> military intervention by the united states and other nations appear to have had an impact. as fox news reporter amy kellog told us last march the number of attacks was down. >> reporter: the naval force apprehends pirates. three attacks on friday alone, and earlier in the week a saudia tanker was capture. >> ultimately you need two things for a pirate vessel, you need a pirate and a ship willing to get pirates. so everything that we do is working against that. >> reporter: navies work together to provide escorts for

ships passing through the gulf of aden and promised air cover, but outside of the gulf of aden itself, protecting ships from pirates is more of a challenge. >> they get on board in as little as ten minutes and because of the vastness of the water space, i mean in the somalia basin, the entire east coast of the united states is what we're talking about here. >> reporter: the ei naval task force claims that successful pirate attacks are do you know by more than half since 2008. but with as many as 35,000 ships passing through that waterway every year and a steady supply of the pirates it's a situation that begs for a truly long-term solution. when we come back on "a second look," training to be a pirate armed guard on a ship off the coast of somalia. there was a time when the

u.s.s. pampanito had a life-saving mission.

. last year the problem pirates off the coast of the somalia came to world war attention when armed men took over the freighter maersk alabama and held the captain hostage until u.s. naval seals rescued him. they can only do so much to stop the pirates in the  thousands of square miles in the ocean. so a lot of companies have put their own armed guards on board. in june of last year, reporter ben wedman showed us some of the ships the ship is n attack. the bullets, however, are blanks and there are no pirates in the northern israeli port. an israeli firm is holding its first-ever anti-piracy course. ship guards are being instruct

by retired israeli commandos. >> earlier this year private israeli guards on an italian cruiseship successfully thrwarted an attack, wherein in the last year somali pirates have capture dozens of ships. the security company, which has no connection to the guards from the italian cruiseship is trying to cash in on the incident, boosting of israeli's unique experience and his combat philosophy. >> we do not give up. we not give up. we create conditions that i will say "the american way." so we give them an offer they cannot refuse. >> reporter: and it was also a

chance for representative from israeli's main weapon manufactures to show off their latest deadly wares. >> you can see a very short weapon that i can hide it. >> reporter: the apartments are playing the roll of pirates boarding the ship and instructors hope that the graduates of this course will make it much more difficult for anybody to get this close. they believe with arm and potentially dangerous guards on board ships, the pirates themselves may end up walking the plank. ben weidman in northern israel. the armed guards on portland those ships have had some effect. somalia pirates hit the same ship, but this time private guards successfully football fought off the attack. >> for decades the united states and soviet union built

up their arsenals if the cold war turned hot. since the soviet union broke up, in 1992, ktvu aired a program about the last airshow at moffitt show and during that show we interviewed a former american fighter pilot who recently flown the top-of-the- line soviet jet, the mig 29. >> i had an opportunity to flight mig 29, the russian equivalent, in their minds, anyway, the f-18. >> reporter: the top-of-the- line? >> we're take a look at the video of your flight. >> this is their current frontline fighter. this is the chief test pilot since 1977, flying this aircraft. >> when you got it, were you different or were you surprised how familiar you were? >> it was very different. i guess it would be fair to describe it it looked more like a boiler room on a steamship.

we're used to videogames and cathode ray tube displays and this is an old analog airplane. >> how about speed and maneuverability? >> it was every bit as sophisticated as handling capability in our inventory. you throw the front-end and point it straight up, if you want to go right or left, very agile and rock solid i got a briefing before and he would do an maneuver and i would do an maneuver. what is the difference between a russian fighter pilot and an

american fighter pilot? >> as you saw on the top gun movie, they are individuals and they are more regimented both tactically and strategical and they are more ground-controlled and now do this and turn right ape left. for instance, the biggest instrument in the cockpit of a mig 29 is a clock. you turn right so many degrees for so long and turn left and that is how they conduct their operations. something on the ground telling them where and how to go. >> when we come back "a second look," how the u.s.s. pom pantyo saved the lives of dozens of prisoners of war during world war ii.

. >> floating in water behind san francisco's fisherman's wharf, a the submarine

pampanito was its life-saving operation. >> reporter: there she lays the u.s.s. pampanito, a relic of a war some 60 years gone. today she is a fisherman wafer's tourist attraction, one of a handful of submarines preserved from world war ii, but there will always been some maritime sense of mystery to the submarine, men who take her down to wage war beneath the ocean's waves. >> it had to be a little crazy to begin with, because who would want to live in a subhuman situation that you lived in a submarine? because it's miserable living. >> reporter: in september of 1944, the pampanito with a crew of 89 set sail on its third war patrol and this time they were enroute to the china seas between the philippines and formossa and and their mission

was to attack japanese operations anywhere and everywhere the pampanito encounters a japanese convoy of 12 ships. >> unknown to the submarines athe time, two of these ships were carrying british and australian prisoners of war. >> reporter: more than 2000pows went into the water. 1500 were never accounted, nor. 650 were picked up by the japanese and reshipped to labor camps and the rest were left to drift in the chinese sea. two days later the pampanito went back to the area and a lookout spotted a raft with men on it, the crew was immediately

suspicious. >> nobody is your friend out there and sometime the japanese would use people as decoys and underneath it would be a submarine or vessel that would jump you. so they within the sure who these people were. >> initially we thought they were japanese survives and we were going shoot them off the ramp. that was the drill. one of the men stood up and waived a big australian hat and calling out in english. >> reporter: quickly and as gently as the open sea would alubbock the crew of pampanito, began to bring the survivors on board. these gaunt, desperate men undernourished to begin with were suffering from malari, berry berry and nearly three years of the harshest imprisonment imaginable and theaterly four day as drift in

the ocean. they came aboard the pampanito, being torpedoed was suddenly the best thing that happened to these men. >> they were sure they were going to die. first they were sent from indochina to japan to work in a coal mine or something like that, which is also a death sentence. you on these horrible ships, with the hulls batoned down. >> the pampanito pharmacist took care of them as best he could. only one of the 73 could die. they cleaned the oil off and dress their sores and giving the survivors as much food as they could handle. soon they began to come around. for the first time in years they had moved out of shadow and death and light in the cramped undersea heaven of the submarine that sank them. what bitter irony had ever

tasted sweeter? the men would be transported to the american-held island of saipan. pearl harbor would be the next stop for the former prisoners of war on their long dreamt of journey home. the american submariners had take good care of them. >> somebody gave you your life back, amazing. >> reporter: it will be hard to look at this aged creaking submarine and ever thing of again as another cog in the machinery of war. a life-taker by design, the pampanito would be remembered now as a lifesaver. >> that is it for this weekend's "a second look." i'm frank somerville. we'll see you again next week.