Treasure Hunters
Sunken treasure.
The two words conjure up
romantic images. Shipwrecks. Gold.
Doubloons. Brave men battling the elements
and fighting off sharks.
“There is a cool factor,” Pat Murphy says.
“A lot of times we’ll tell people and they don’t believe us. No
really, that’s what we do.”
Murphy, “43 going on 12,” is the captain of the Blue Water
Rose. He was born in Connecticut and now calls South Florida
home, but he says he’s “from the ocean.” He’s always been a
waterman — as a salvage diver, commercial spearfisherman, and
captain of dive boats, yachts, and charters — but this is his first
treasure hunt.
“I love it,” he says. “I was always a big fan of history, especially
American history. This combines something that I grew up liking
with the opportunity to dive.”
Keith Webb emphasizes the history aspect when describing
Blue Water Ventures.
“I like to say ‘historic shipwreck recovery company with a
twist of archeology,’” Webb says. “People look at treasure hunters
a different way, like they’re shady or something. We’re an
archaeological company that carefully extracts things from the
ocean floor.”
The historic importance of a shipwreck like the Pulaski can’t
be overstated. But still, there’s something incredibly exhilarating
about finding treasure.
“You find a good little pocket of coins, and it’s fun,” Murphy
says. “You get into it. I’ve spit my regulator out once. I started
yelling and oops, well, need that, got to get that back.”
J.R. Darville, who’s “37, I think,” says he’s been in salvage
since he was a kid. He’s worked for Endurance Exploration for
10 years. He looks a little like a pirate with his long beard and
close-shaved head, but he’s the technical guy on the team, the
one who knows about sonar, scanning, GPS, and ROVs (remote
operated vehicles). He builds a lot of his own equipment, and
maintains it all.
He stays topside and doesn’t get the thrill of uncovering the
coins, but he experiences the same excitement in finding treasure.
“When the coins started coming up I lost it,” he says. “I was
like a kid again. We have some video of us cursing and going
crazy. We went ballistic. My hands were full of gold!”
Jimmy Gadomski, who’s 31, was brought onto the team
because of his background as a technical diver.
“They wanted to get more bottom time,” he says. “They were
getting 20 minutes, 25 minutes at first. Now we’re getting an
hour on the bottom. But you can’t go right to the surface like
you would on a normal dive. We’ll stay down there and accumulate
nitrogen, which puts us in decompression. We do staged
stops.”
He takes a scientific approach to diving, and has everything
planned out on computers. But none of that matters when the
first-time treasure hunter is finding things under the sand.
“I’ve done just about everything I can in the diving industry
except for this,” he says. “I wish I would have started it earlier.
You get all excited down there. I found this little golden box, and
this little watch locket. Somebody might have worn this around
their neck, I’m not really sure.”
That’s what Kurt Flitcroft, who left the crew in May, calls “the
mystery and the history.”
36
WBM july 2018
From far left: The
reverse side of the “raw”
coin 4479206-007 after
NCS coin conservation.
The front side is shown
in a holder on page 33.
A Blue Water Ventures
crew at sea. Keith Webb
and his wife, Beth,
aboard the Blue Water
Rose in June 2018. Far
right: The Blue Water
Rose heads through
Masonboro Inlet on the
way to the wreck site.
BLUE WATER VENTURES
ALLISON POTTER
NUMISMATIC GUARANTY CORPORATION