In 1920 Damant and his crew tried centrifugal pumps and dredging grabs, but the space was too constricted and the periods in which they could be used were too short for them to be effective. In fine weather divers worked by hand, and in bad weather the sand filled what they had cleared. In the summer of 1920 they retrieved only seven gold bars, but in the summer of 1921 they cleared many hundreds of tons of the wreck's structure and retrieved another 43 bars.