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May 2010 Treasure Season has begun! Captain Greg here! Well the Treasure season of 2010 has begun with us last friday when we made it out to conduct more survey work on some wreck sites. As you know we have been surveying a site since 2003 using a cesium magnetometer and have made great progress. According to the research this ship lost its bottom in deep water and only the upper structure came ashore. Every since this ship was discovered in modern times only the inshore upper structure has been salvaged by modern day salvors with great success. I myself have found many beautiful gold coins and other artifacts on this site working the inshore areas but its evident after working inshore that the whole ship is not there. This has lead me to concentrate my efforts offshore because I believe the ship lost its bottom and all the silver in deep water. Over the years we have discovered numerous artifacts offshore using the magnetometer but it has not lead us to the pile of silver which I believe is still out there so this year I have started to survey using a new tool we acquired in 2008. This new tool is for the most part a sub-bottom profiler. The Sub-bottom profiler allows us to see down through the sand up to 40 meters depending on the seafloor sediment. Offshore of the wreck we are targeting, we have a very dense hard packed mud layer about 3 to 4 feet below the sand which is good for us because most of the material from the wreck is lying on top of the mud. On friday we had very smooth seas which is required when using the sub-bottom and we began profiling the area where we have found ballast, mast rings, musket balls, lead and ceramics offshore in a trail we discovered over the past few years with the mag. Our objective was to tune the sub-bottom so we can see through the first 4 feet of ocean bottom and conduct my passes back and forth across the area where we found most of our shipwreck material offshore. As we make our passes back and forth across the wreck site we are recording the images created by the sub-bottom and also recording the GPS location to correlate the two together. While we are "mowing the lawn" offshore we get an average of what the seafloor consist of by a color spectrum on the computer screen and if we go across an area that has a harder return than the surrounding area its represented by a brighter color such as red so i believe if we drive across a pile of silver for instance it should stand out from the surrounding bottom because the density and high reflectivity of the silver. On Friday we did just that! For most of the day the returns we were seeing on the sub-bottom were orange and yellow representing the ambient strata through the seafloor but one particular area stood out and shouted at us as we passed over it. We drove over this area multiple times and each time we got a similar return which confirms to us that something is there 100%. I am not sure if this area is the bottom of the ship but it fits the bill for location, depth of water, size and the kind of return i would expect from a pile of silver. Near this area we have found a large mast ring, ballast stones, lead, ceramics, musket balls, wood... but we never dug in the area of our anomaly. This could be what we have been looking for but we never located it with the mag because its not got a lot of iron on it just silver and non-ferrous material. I have attached a snap shot of the anomaly so you can see how it stands out from the ambient bottom around it.
Captain Greg
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