Another quote from Joy Waldron Murphy's article about the Titanic in the August, 1987 issue of Smithsonian magazine. On page 62 we read:
"The 44 year-old Ballard, a dynamic and charming scientist who once worked as a porpoise trainer at Sea-life Park in Hawaii, heads up the Deep Submergence Laboratory at Woods Hole. In the late 1970s, he proposed to find and photograph the Titanic using the vessel Alcoa Seaprobe, outfitted with a camera lowered on lengths of drill pipe. His follow-up plan was to descend to the ship in the Alvin, a submersible that had been used in his pioneering geological work. In a camera test off the New England coast, however, the drill pipe broke, effectively putting an end to that idea.
About the same time, Ballard formed a private company called Seaonics International Ltd, with photographer Emory Kristof and several others. In June, 1978, Kristof boarded the Coast Guard cutter Evergreen at St. John's Newfoundland. Destination: 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 50 degrees, 14 minutes west. Just north of the reported sinking site, Kristof deployed his cameras to check out the systems and conditions on the bottom. The resulting pictures indicated that visibility was good for more than 100 feet and that the current was nearly nonexistent."
A Google search for Seaonics International Ltd. and Titanic leads one to the French website on Titanic expeditions that has been linked on this message board before. Taking the paragraph from this website and translating from French to English using Babelfish, we get:
1978, Dr. Robert Ballard created the company Seaonics International Ltd. in collaboration with William (Bill) H. Tantum IV, President/cofounder of Titanic Historical Society. The objective was to seek the wreck and to envisage its exploration. The group included/understood several scientists of foreground and the explorers. The funds necessary to towed submarines creation able to photograph the wreck were however not found and the project failed.
From my own knowledge, the fourth partner in Seaonics International Ltd. was Alan Ravenscroft, film producer.