by Hep Aldridge
Gus said, “I’ll be damned; you did find treasure.”
“Yep,” I said as we unloaded the bag and began stacking the ingots on the deck.
The Coms squawked as I heard Joe say they had the second crate loaded intact and were sending it up. I couldn’t stop grinning as I looked at Gus’s astonished expression.
“Gus,” I said, “I’m pretty sure you and your crew are about to get a raise.” The second lift bag hit the surface, and we repeated the retrieval process. This time, it was an intact wooden crate. It looked to be about a foot or so square and seven or eight inches high. We grabbed the crowbar and carefully removed the top. Having been Completely buried in the sand the wood on the crate was in remarkably good shape.
As we pried the top up, 12 more gold bars saw the light of day, the first since 1715, more than 300 years ago. I just stared for a couple of minutes and thought this is indeed one of those life-changing moments: viewing something no one has seen for 300 years and of such immense wealth.
Now, Gus spoke, “I can’t believe this is really happening; you’re just bringing this stuff up one after another, easy as pie.”
I broke out of my reverie and said, “It looks that way Gus, but I guarantee you a lot of time and hard work have gone into getting to this point. You happen to be lucky enough to have joined our group just before pay-day.”
He looked at me, shook his head and said, “No shit, Captain!”
The Coms squawked again; it was Doc this time, “Colt, you copy?”
I went to the table where the Com unit was set up and keyed the mic, “I’m here, Doc.”
“We’ve gone over the hole created by the second crate and the surrounding area, no more hits with the detectors.”
“Roger that, we’ve got about another hour left of bottom time, continue moving north along the base of the shoal,” I said.
“Copy, moving north,” Doc replied.
Within five minutes, Joe came over the radio, “I’ve got a hit, and it’s a big one!”
Doc came back, “Colt, Joe’s about ten feet in front of us moving north; we’re taking the lift to his position now.”
“I copy” I said. Now, it was starting to get crazy on deck. Gold bars were being removed from the crate and stowed next to the wheel house; the higher the stack got, the more excited everyone became.
Twenty-five minutes later, Joe’s voice came over the radio, “We’ve got another… no, wait… Holy Shit, we have two more crates down here.” I dropped into one of the deck chairs and the mic I had been holding fell from my grip.
Everyone had stopped what they were doing and were just standing, staring at the radio. I don't know how much time went by, but in a minute or two, I said under my breath, “Son of a bitch!”
Now there was serious chatter from below. There were whoops and hollers coming over the radio, and when it finally sunk in, the deck exploded with the same responses, and the celebrations began! One crate was found almost directly on top of the second and around five feet deep in the sand. We surmised that was the way they were stacked in the longboat when she broke up and they fell straight to the bottom, unaffected by the waves or storm.
Within the next hour and a half, we had raised the two new crates, still intact, and had them on board. The three scuba boys were just about out of air, so all divers returned to the surface. We got all the equipment on board and stowed, and once the divers had their gear off, we gathered around the last two crates. Just like the other two, when the lids came off, there were three layers of gold ingots, each ingot was about four inches long, three inches wide and two inches thick, 12 ingots per layer and each crate weighed a little less than 500 pounds. In one day, we had recovered 132 gold ingots, total value somewhere around $44,184,000! Not bad for a day’s work!
Once we got things stowed and the deck cleared off, the beer, whiskey, and rum flowed freely. Divvying-up our find eight ways came to a little over five million apiece, and that was only finding four of the crates!
I pulled Gus aside and said, “As of right now you and your men’s salary just went to two thousand dollars a day.”
He was still walking around like a man in a daze, “Uh, Okay,” he said with a beer in one hand a bottle of whiskey in the other, “That’s just fine, Colt… just fine.” With that dazed look still on his face, he turned and walked over to the nearest chair and sat down. I didn’t even try to contain myself and went around slapping the other guys on the back and congratulating them with clinking cans, bottles, and glasses. The sun was starting to slowly spread its orange glow in the western sky. Things had settled down a bit as we all sat around on the deck, but the smiles on our faces would have had to been chiseled off. I felt like something should be said so I stood up and looked at everyone, “Gentlemen,” I said, “today has been a monumental day, a day I wasn’t sure would ever come, especially this soon. We have all worked hard to get here, endured a lot, and now are reaping the rewards of those efforts.”
Dimitri looked at me and said “Aw, shit, Colt, don’t go getting all philosophical on us.”
Everyone laughed, including me, as Doc said, “Let the man finish. I always get a kick out of it when he tries to do this kind of stuff.”
Now, everyone roared I knew the moment had passed, so I let it go and finished with, “I just want to thank you all for your efforts and believing in our adventure.”
Doc said, “You know there are still six more crates down there and we’re going to find them all!” That was followed by a bunch of hell yeahs, damn rights, and a couple of amens!
I doubt that anyone slept much that night. Doc, Joe, and I spent the night on the Lisa B, and everyone else stayed on the Falcon. We talked quietly until the wee hours of the morning. The excitement finally wore down and sleep crept in for a few hours, but as soon as the sun started coming up, we were wide awake.
We could smell the bacon and fresh coffee smells Coming from next door. We had taken the Zodiac last night to our boat, so we motored over to one of Smittys’ sumptuous breakfasts of bacon, eggs, hash browns, and some of the best coffee I have ever tasted. We were all trying to contain ourselves, but chores had to be done first and the day’s gear laid out on the deck. Once this was done, Lawrence, Dimitri, Joe and Doc suited up and hit the water.
Our shark friends were back, nothing to worry about but the divers had started carrying bang sticks just in case. Using the same plan as the day before, Lawrence and Dimitri continued to work the edge of the shoal with metal detectors while Doc and Joe followed the longitudinal search pattern six to ten feet away from the shoal with their detectors.
As they slowly worked their way northward, it was Doc who came up with the next hit. He reported a moderate signal and began fanning and digging by hand. Luckily, the bottom sand was easily moved, and it wasn’t difficult for him to work his way down about a foot and a half to two feet until the glint of gold became visible. He had found a single bar. That confirmed that at least one of the crates had broken open and spilled its contents on the ocean floor. Dimitri and Lawrence had not had any hits next to the shoal base, so they moved a little further out and joined Doc and Joe in the longitudinal search pattern. Within another 15, minutes both Lawrence and Joe had gotten hits and uncovered three more bars about two and a half feet below the sandy bottom. It was slow going, but by the time their scuba tanks were getting low, they had recovered another 16 bars, 20 bars total. That still left 16 out there somewhere.
We were only diving in 20 to 25 feet of water, so there was decent light from the surface. On the bottom, a current was picking up and visibility had decreased from 12 feet or so to 6 to 8 feet. I called the dive, and they put the bars in one of the lift bags and sent it up. It was retrieved by Smitty as the divers surfaced.
Excitement was still running high as we pulled the bag onto the deck. Our stack of ingots continued to grow. The current made it harder to control our broader search area and the lift, so I suggested for the next dive we concentrate back on the edge of
the shoal. Although some still wanted to continue our search further out, it was agreed that due to the decreased visibility and the current, searching the shoal edge was our best bet. The shoal helped block some current and made the dive somewhat easier.
After an hour’s rest I changed the dive teams and sent Tony, Wild Bill, Smitty, who was chomping at the bit to get below the surface, and Dimitri back down. Gus said Smitty was part fish and would do fine diving with the crew. I told him that was good because I assigned Dimitri as his partner and was sure that Dimitri had gills somewhere on his body. After only 45 minutes, Dimitri called in and said the current had picked up dramatically and visibility had dropped to two to three feet. I had no choice but to call the dive. I wasn’t going to risk any of the divers in those kinds of conditions. When everyone was aboard we went through the routine of cleaning and stowing the gear. It was early afternoon, and I decided to call it a day and see what things looked like in the morning. We were going to take the Lisa B back in the next day to move the gold to the safety of our facility and to have the scuba tanks filled. I figured we had one more dive session the next morning before we headed back in, current and visibility permitting.
As we sat around the deck, we reviewed and discussed the dives so far. Lawrence asked why we thought we were finding the gold so shallow in the sand. The deepest we had excavated had been around four or five feet. I said I have no idea, just figured we were lucky. Junkyard laughed and said that, during the winter, there was a very strong current that passed around the cape. He thought that most of the sand that might get built up over the summer got moved northward with the current during the winter. So, instead of being ten to twenty feet deep in the sand like it probably would be by the end of summer and hurricane season; it was only two to six feet beneath the sand now at the beginning of the summer season due to the shifting currents. That’s also why we saw so many dark shapes in the water during our aerial search. More of their physical shape had been uncovered during the winter by the current. Gus concurred with Junkyard. He said he had run into the currents during his years of fishing in this area and heard many other fishing boats telling of the same thing. There you have it, mystery solved, if only the other mysteries surrounding this wreck were that easily explained.
Unfortunately for us the weather took a turn for the worse during the night and the next morning saw gray skies, wind and choppy seas. No weather for diving! We hauled anchors and headed back to port after loading the gold onto the Lisa B which was no mean feat with the Zodiac and the current weather conditions. It was a bumpy ride home, but in a couple of hours, we were inside the Jetties of the port and things smoothed out considerably. We watched Gus pull the Falcon into the marina where he had his slip. We headed for the locks to make our way into the Banana River and Tony’s house. Another hour and a half and we were safely tied up in the canal and beginning to unload dive gear and “other cargo,” very discreetly! We had left the dive weights on the boat and replaced them with shiny gold ones in the dive bags. Two coolers and a couple of other cases we had on board helped us move the gold. The CES cargo van was parked out front, and by the time we got our “gear” loaded, its suspension was being put to work.
Everything included we had over a ton of cargo in the van. We headed for our new CES facility. “I refused to call it our Lair,” and there we reversed the procedure once the van was in the cargo bay and the outside bay door was shut. We got busy unloading everything, cleaning it, and staging it for re-loading in the van for our next trip out and moving the ingots to the vault.
In retrospect I’m glad the weather turned on us, no one realized how tired they were until we got back. With the gold secured, I said I was heading out, and Joe and Dimitri said, “Hey, have at least one celebratory drink before you go.”
I agreed, and after more back slapping, hand-shakings and hell yeahs, I hit the door to be followed soon thereafter by the rest of the guys. We had agreed to meet the next day at four, and I put in a call to Gus to let him know about the meeting. He said he would be there. As I pulled into my driveway, all I wanted was a hot shower, a soft bed and about 14 hours of sleep. Well, two out of three ain't bad!
Chapter Twelve
The next morning, the weather had gotten worse. Cloudy, rainy, and windy, we weren’t going anywhere. I contacted Fitz via our secure Com-link, gave him a quick update, and planned for another pickup and delivery. He congratulated me on the fantastic news and asked how long we'd be in port. I told him I wasn’t sure. I would look at the long-range weather forecast and let him know later. He said to call him later that afternoon; he might be able to get away for a visit. I told everyone we were standing down till the weather cleared, so they all had a chance to play catch up after spending the time getting ready for our trip and our past three days at sea.
Doc and I spent more time at the Lair, looking at the oceanographic charts laid out on the conference table, and talking over next moves. We both agreed that finishing up the shoal area search should be priority one. Once we were sure we had found everything we could, we would look for the ship. In the meantime, we speculated on its location projecting out from the shoal. The water in our search area was 20 to 25 feet deep. Within a mile east, it went to 40 to 50 feet and stayed between 40 and 60 feet for the next mile or two. We pulled up the telemetry from Fitz’s Neptune on the 70-inch LED screen we had installed in the conference room along with the terminal tied into the “Lair’s” cutting edge Computer system… Okay, I called it the Lair, so sue me; it sounds better than Main Office, Headquarters, or Home base, at least more dramatic.
As we sat and reviewed our aerial search, we looked more closely at the dark images on the bottom. Having Fitz’s data to Compare our video to was great. We were able to either identify what we had seen or mark it as a bogie and log the GPS info for further underwater inspection. The biggest bogie we had turned out to be a large shrimping boat, 70-feet long, that had sunk during a storm in ‘72.
She was pretty well intact and lying on her side on the bottom in 60 feet of water. Partially covered by sand, she was visible as a big blob from the air but reviewing Fitz’s Neptune data, we had a high-definition image of her. The detail Neptune provided was impressive, like an underwater photograph. After we had stared at the image for quite a while, Doc finally said, “There’s something strange about that wreck.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Not sure.” he replied, “what other angles do we have of her?” I moved the digital image around as much as I could to no real revelation I could see. After some time studying the image, Doc said, “There’s just something that’s not right. I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s not right.”
I said, “Well I can’t see anything; let’s take a break, and we’ll come back to it.” He agreed, and we went on to the rest of the images. By the time we finished, two-and-a-half hours had passed, and our eyes were crossing from staring at the big screen in front of us. We agreed to call it a day. We had identified six images or bogies we thought ought to be investigated first-hand. All were around a mile to a mile and a half east or east-southeast of the shoal… the outer limit was the steel-hulled shrimper wreck.
We speculated that the longboat could not have made it much further than two miles at the most from the ship in hurricane seas before she hit the shoal. That narrowed our search area to the one we had just identified with the video review.
I looked at Doc and said, “I hope our guess is right.”
He agreed and said, “It’s an educated one, but if we find nothing we expand it using the same parameters we have for this area. We know the hurricane came from east-southeast, winds and waves pushing west by north west. We found the cargo of the longboat on the shoal; the big variable in the equation is how far did the longboat get from the ship before hitting the shoal and breaking apart?”
”That’s a big variable! We’re thinking only a mile or two, but what if they got three to five miles?”
“Well, then," D
oc said, “We will be looking in the wrong area by a large margin, as they say… we’ll have our dog in the wrong hunt.”
“Well, that’s a problem for later. For now, we need to concentrate on finishing what we started and as quickly as possible.”
Doc concurred, “Another thing, if we are going to legitimize our, what I’ll call Phase Two search, we should incorporate Risky Business and get ready to file a legal search claim with the Feds."
“I know, Doc, just when I was starting to enjoy this whole pirate thing.”
He laughed. “We should get Lawrence working on that sooner rather than later; it will take time to make that happen.” I agreed and asked him to contact him and get the ball rolling. He agreed, and with that, our little meeting came to an end.
The rest of the week was filled with lousy weather and getting our gear ready for the next trip. Tony was still keeping an eye in the sky on the shoal with no visitors to report. Fitz had Come by and made a pickup and delivery, personally, without Ms. O’Reilly, much to Dimitri’s and Lawrence’s dismay. We refueled and restocked both vessels. We tried to keep Lawrence busy with the legal stuff that needed attending to for our ship search, but he still found time for a little carousing with the ladies. In fact, he announced he would stay in port on our next trip out. He had an invitation to a Napa Valley wine tasting he couldn’t turn down. However, he assured us this would not interfere with his assigned task of getting Risky Business legal, and it would be taken care of ASAP.
I said, “Fine, just don’t drop the ball on this, and keep quiet about our work, no bragging about being a millionaire or a treasure hunter.” He assured me discretion would be his utmost concern.