I haven't heard where the location is exactly where they're sinking this sub off Juno beach.
Posted: 5:43 p.m. Friday, January 20, 2017
JUNO BEACH —
Palm Beach County agreed this month to pay $1 million toward the sinking of a Cold War-era sub off Juno Beach.
But another ship’s already there.
Or, at least, around the spot where the USS Clamagore would be sunk as Florida’s only submarine artificial reef if the private firm handling it can raise another $3 million. The 320-foot “Gray Ghost of the Florida Coast,” could be dropped perhaps as early as this summer as the newest addition to the county’s renowned 150-plus piece artificial reef program.
Tampa-based Seafarer Explorations says it has found debris from a Spanish galleon that went down in the 16th century and left treasure that could be worth billions.
When Seafarer CEO Kyle Kennedy read news reports saying the Clamagore’s resting place would be in 90 feet of water, about 1-1/2 miles off the Juno Beach Fishing Pier, that sure sounded like it would be in the 7-square-mile area, from about a half-mile northeast of the Juno Beach Pier to about 2-1/2 miles south, where courts have granted him rights to the ocean floor.
Not so, says Dan Bates, deputy director of the county’s Department of Environmental Resources Management.
“It may be that we’re adjacent to each other,” Bates said Friday. He said his site is on state lands and the county already has a permit to drop a reef there.
“We’ve had that for a long time. It’s one of our longest permanent sites,” he said.
“Then it must be a slightly different location,” Kennedy said Friday on hearing Bates’ comments. But he said he still worries about being too close to the sub.
“If it’s outside my area there’s nothing I can do about it.,” Kennedy said. But, he said, “when you have a lot of divers, they start looting that stuff.”
Kennedy said he’s not worried about losing any treasures, which would be buried under up to 23 feet of shifting sand. But he said other items that have just historic value — no less priceless— could end up on someone’s living room shelf.
“There’s plenty of room in the ocean,” Kennedy said Friday. “We just want to protect what we have.”
Kennedy first heard of his shipwreck’s possible existence from an amateur diver several years ago. He and the diver eventually split and Kennedy, in court, won full rights to whatever is found there now and in the future. Treasure salvagers are monitored by the state Bureau of Archaeology, which gets 20 percent of the value of the treasure, including its pick of the most archaeologically valuable finds.
Kennedy said he’s spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in research, including trips to Seville to view the archives of Spain’s American colonies. Also: visits to France and seven trips to Cuba. He still can’t find anything that would show the ship’s name, travel time, route, crew, or cargo. But, he said, “there’s absolutely a ship that sank there.”
He’s confident it’s there, and it’s Spanish, and from the 1550s to 1570s, and that the ship anchored during a storm and then was dragged toward shore and eventually sank.
That’s because the anchor’s still there, the cannonballs are linked to a specific period and Seafarer has found 1,000 items whose era can be determined.
“Nails, barrel rings, pottery, cannon balls, musket balls, lead sheeting, (and) serpentine jade,” a type of stone used for ballast, Kennedy said.
But he’s also found pieces of what he said is priceless Ming-era china. And he believes he eventually will find gold, silver, emeralds, and perhaps more.
He said he showed what he had to the Mel Fisher salvage group, and was told whatever’s there potentially is worth $4 billion to $5 billion,”because of the size of the ship and the age of the ship and what ships of those era carried.”
Kennedy said he has years ahead of him before he realizes his dream. He said current scanners have found scores of iron items but any gold or silver can’t be spotted that far down. He said he hopes future technology will change that. He also said he doesn’t believe anyone else has recovered any of whatever’s buried way beneath the ocean floor; “if someone found something, they’d have said something.”
