Word: mchaley
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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...
...first two days, 40 divers brought up more than 200 silver ingots, weighing 7 tons. Each bar was 15 in. long and tipped the scales at about 70 lbs. Divers also found the archetypal treasures of a shipwreck: wooden chests spilling over with coins. According to McHaley, the Atocha's inventory includes more than 1,000 silver bars, which were bound for Spain from Cuba and other New World colonies in 1622, when the ship sank in a hurricane's high winds and raging seas. Estimates of the worth of the booty range as high as $400 million. Some local...
...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 that cost us years." The random wreckage from the lost ship had been scattered by a second hurricane centuries before. In the end, the main lode was found very near the reef where Fisher thought it would...
...People think we just go out in rowboats and fish up treasure," says Treasure Salvors Vice President Bleth McHaley, "but it took us seven years to find it, and seven more years to establish our right to keep it." Finding it involved 400,000 miles of crisscrossing the ocean, towing special magnetometers developed by Treasure Salvors' Fay Feild, an electronics engineer. Occasionally, Fisher brought in seers, psychics and trained dolphins to break the technological tedium. There were thousands of fruitless dives into holes blown through 20 ft. of sand. And in 1975 there was tragedy. A week after...
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