Most of the bars were buried in of sand, silt or mud. The divers would use a fire hose lowered from "Racer" to loosen the silt, although this reduced visibility to almost nil. They wore standard diving dress but chose to work bare-handed, using improvised scoops to dig and thrusting their hands into the loosened silt and recognising gold bars by touch by their fingertips. They wore their fingertips raw and suffered pain every night after work. But the method was effective, and in 1923 they retrieved 1,255 bars worth nearly £2 million. Each diver was paid a bounty of a half crown for each £100 of gold recovered.