Tag: shipwreck

Shipwreck With $235M Worth of Silver Discovered

Less than 2 months ago I wrote an article about a shipwreck that had been discovered off the coast of St. Maarten. It was thought to possibly contain buried treasure. I still haven’t heard back on that from my friends there, so my guess is that it’s still waiting to be pulled up out of the sea..

About a week later, a US sea exploration company discovered a ship that is indeed filled with silver. It had gone missing in 1941 about 300 miles off the Irish coast when it was torpedoed by a German sub. I bet it sank very quickly, since it also happened to be carrying 200 tonnes of silver. That would be about $235 million worth, by today’s silver prices.

The company that made this discovery (Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc.) will get to keep up to 80% of the silver. With that much silver and money involved, no wonder that the fact that it’s 8,000 feet below sea level doesn’t seem to be a huge deterrent to them.

Their recovery expedition is scheduled to start next spring.

Strangely enough, the precise GPS coordinates for the exact location of the shipwreck don’t seem to have been released publicly. But this hasn’t stopped the company shares from rising since this discovery hit news wires.

My thought is that if we all start practicing holding your breath for long periods of time starting now, then we might be in good enough shape to discreetly do the 8000-foot deep dive to get a little piece of the action for ourselves. Meanwhile, I’ll keep asking around for the GPS coordinates.

Sure it’s a long shot. But as long as they’re still finding real buried treasure out there somewhere, we can all keep dreaming, right?

In any case, don’t forget that you heard about it first from the friendly folks at C Marshall Fabrication Machinery.

Buried Treasure (really)!

I live on a beautiful beach on an island in the Caribbean. It’s not always easy, but someone’s gotta do it. And yes, this is an actual recent photo that I personally took.

When a beach is your front yard, you get pretty familiar with the comings and goings of the boats in your neighborhood. In recent weeks, a new boat has been showing up about 100 meters out from the beach and about a 7 minute walk from my house. The boat says “Research Vessel” on it. Yesterday I found out why:

This boat has discovered a 200 year-old shipwreck which it is preparing to explore. This island is notorious for stupid political tangles, and when it comes to things like approving someone’s petition to explore an old wreck, things can get tied up for a bit since everyone wants a piece of the potential loot. Especially when it’s a known fact that this was a merchant ship which came here by way of Brazil. Back then, one of Brazil’s biggest industries and exports was its melting and casting of iron and metals, including silver and gold. Another treasure this shipwreck is rumored to possibly have is antique porcelain, which in addition to being very valuable is also extraordinarily beautiful.

So while the research vessel continues to vie for government approval to start the exploration of the shipwreck, a few of us beach dwellers are already plotting how we might take advantage of this unique situation. The fact that we know exactly where the wreck is admittedly presents a few temptations. One of the neighbors, who lives on the cliff above the location of the shipwreck, has already posted a sentry with binoculars so that he can track exactly when excavations begin, at which point he fully intends to go on an exploratory dive of his own under cover of night, to see what he can find.

As for the rest of us, there will most likely be a significant increase in foot traffic on the beach. I predict that most of us will increase our daily exercise regimen with the addition of several daily casual strolls along the beach, in hopes that we might stub our toe on a gold or silver bar just happened to have washed up from the excavation. I also plan on increasing my snorkeling activities dramatically. After all, one can hope and dream, and people who live on beaches in the Caribbean are already, for the most part, hopeless romantics (the rest are just good old-fashioned pirates).

I did a quick online search on buried treasure and found a link on “12 Real Life Buried Treasures”. Some of these treasures go back to the 1500’s and are worth many billions of dollars! So it can happen, folks. If it happens to me, I probably won’t tell you though.

-Anja Wulf