 Thousands of gallons of crude oil are oozing into the Louisiana Coast. Make no mistake, we will do whatever is necessary. What is necessary? This is a crisis. I'm just a commercial fisherman. My whole life is based on this. And we brought in the best and the brightest of all the minds that could deal with this. Team Vortex is about seven people right now, basically a small company with a couple of guys with an idea, and now we're basically taking an idea to commercialize it and hopefully launch it through the X-Price competition. We're not a big company. Nobody's getting paid here. I mean, this is just because people have a real passion on seeing something happen and trying to make a change. We have no experience, and that's what makes it fun. We get asked all the time, how long have you been in the oil industry, and I, well, counting today? A lot of people want to know your credentials and they want to know what kind of experience you have and all that. I've got to tell you how many guys said, you're out of your ball game here. This is way out of your league. Even my father might not. I actually think you can compete with those guys. Those guys got years and years of experience of doing this. They've been on actual spills. What in the hell are we doing here? The advantage we have is that we are not influenced by anything the industry has done because we have no idea what they've done. We didn't look at anybody else's design of what they were doing. We just said, if we were going to get oil out of the ocean, how would we do it? And that's what we came up with. It's like a salt mine. What we have is the eel system, the emergency extraction line. We call it the eel because it looks like an eel in the water. It's just basically a boom that can actually extract oil as it comes in contact with it. I wanted something that was very flexible by nature, that floats, that was stable in the water, that can do high volumes, but yet was easy to deploy and to handle for people. Our team is about as quirky and as unconventional as it gets. My full-time job back home is running a tattoo studio in Las Vegas. I never thought I'd be doing this ever, you know. When I was drawing something up, I thought, I'm going to help Ashley out. I'm going to send him something that can help him come closer to his dreams and aspirations. Fred and I got together and I said, Fred, you know, let's get some idea. Let's start sketching out some ideas. This was just like the very first eel that was built. Is that the one with the wide open front as opposed to the ports? Yeah, so this is doing float tests in my swimming pool. I have goosebumps because I can't believe that I'm actually here. I mean, just to be here. This is our first shot at it. I mean, this is the actual first time we've ever sucked oil with a thing. There's not been a drop of oil in that thing except for what we spill on it when we're working on it. It's the first time we've ever pulled the eel. This is the first time we've ever sucked with a 12-inch line besides in the harbor for an hour. It's the first time we've ever had any weather conditions. Yeah, that's not good. They told us, you know, what we got here. He said, everybody thinks their stuff's indestructible until they get in that wave pool. Yeah, our second pool. The waves were jerking on the tow cables. Look at that. Look at that. Oh, we just lost the cable. Stop! Stop! Hopefully, we did rip something off the side of the cable. And it actually pulled out the whole side of one eel. Just ripped it right out. Pull back. Sorry. You know, when that popped off, you know, we didn't even think twice. Oh, we can fix that. How? We don't know yet. But we can fix it. You know, nothing ever goes easy for us. If it was easy, anybody could do it. It's always worth quarter, and you got the ball, right? I mean, it's kind of the position I always hoped to be in. It kind of going for broke on this one. So, here we go. Last run, once we hit the oil patch, we flipped the switch, and it was falling. We couldn't have asked for any more. The pump was at full RPM, 2,000 RPM, which is supposed to be 50 or 100 gallons a minute. Go, go, go, go! A place like this where the world comes to test their technologies. These guys have been here for years. I said, listen, we've never seen anything like this before. This is unbelievable. And you actually shattered the record that we've ever felt was possible on our first trial day out. I know. They're like crazy. What's that all about? I pass. Woo! Woo-hoo! A bunch of knuckles. I don't even know how it's possible. We did it, so. We did what we said we can do, and we're not even done yet. That alone, for me, even if I never won the prize, I just can't do it. I just can't tell you how proud that makes me.