Word: fishered
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...weeks ago, Fisher's persistence paid off. His divers, reconnoitering 54 ft. below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, 40 miles west of Key West, came upon what Bleth McHaley, vice president of Fisher's Treasure Salvors Inc., has since described as "a reef of silver bars with lobsters living in it." Many are now calling the find the largest ever recovered from a shipwreck. "They were jumping up and down and waving their hands at us in the water," says Kane Fisher, Mel's 26-year-old son, referring to the pair of divers who made the initial discovery...
...conducting its long and meticulous search, Fisher's salvaging team used the most advanced underwater detection machinery available. Side-scanning sonar, similar to the type used in finding the black boxes of the Air-India crash, provided a detailed chart of the ocean floor. A high-speed magnetometer located the ferrous metals commonly found in old cannons, muskets and ship fittings. The crew also employed a method that Fisher devised for scouring the ocean bottom: huge pipes are placed at a salvage ship's stern near the propellers, which drive jets of water through the cylinders, helping to uncover buried...
Despite all the high-tech tools, the ocean proved very reluctant to give up the Atocha's treasure. For 101 days in 1968, Fisher's divers combed an area near the Upper and Lower Matecumbe Keys for the ship, using as their guides a number of Spanish archival documents that referred to the lost galleon. Fisher's crew found lesser wrecks that yielded up sizable bounties, but the big one remained undiscovered...
...year later Fisher called on the services of Eugene Lyon. He had been researching a doctoral thesis on the historical Spanish presence in Florida at the government archives in Seville, Spain, where Fisher was a frequent visitor. After poring over 50,000 pages of worm-eaten documents, Lyon turned up information that pointed the way to the Atocha: the original 17th century salvors' report indicated that the treasure ship could be found near the desolate Marquesas Keys, off Key West...
...Fisher immediately sent his divers to the area, and instructed them to investigate a 3-sq.-mi. patch of underwater reef ten miles southwest of the Marquesas. He was relying on the supposition that the Atocha had probably split asunder on the reef. But a small find that at first seemed encouraging led him astray. In 1973 Fisher's boat, the Virgalona, hauled up his first Atocha finds, an anchor and three silver bars, some two miles or so from the site that Fisher had targeted. Says McHaley: "I wish we had never found them. It was a false lead...