Treasure Found – Latest Treasure hunting News!
Note that a metal detector was used to help find this!!
Treasure hunter Bonnie Schubert has found plenty of aluminum beer cans and lead fishing weights in the Atlantic Ocean, but she recently came up with a gold bird in one hand and a thumbs-up on the other.
Wednesday, the Vero Beach woman and the company for which she subcontracts out of Sebastian announced the details of her August "dream of a lifetime" haul — a 5½-inch-tall, 77-gram, 22-karat gold pelican found two miles south of the Fort Pierce inlet.
Part of the salvage from 11 Spanish ships that sank off the Treasure Coast in a hurricane in July 1715, the artifact was discovered with help from a metal detector, 15 feet under water and buried in more than 8 feet of sand.
Even with what appears to be a missing wing, and an unexplained open spot in the middle of the piece, its appraised value of $885,000 blows Schubert away.
"It was just totally amazing to blow the sand away and find this gold bird lying on the bottom of the ocean
," said Schubert, whose crewmate on the Gold Hawg boat is her 87-year-old mother, Jo Schubert.
"It's something I couldn't even have imagined. It's still amazing. This is definitely the biggest thing we've ever found, without question. It's something you couldn't dream of topping."
Bonnie Schubert is a subcontractor for 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels, a private shipwreck salvage operation based in Sebastian. In June, 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels acquired salvage rights to the fleet from the heirs of famed treasure hunter Mel Fisher. That gives the company the fleet's U.S. Admiralty Custodianship, operating under a contract issued by the state's Division of Historical Resources.
That same month, another subcontractor for 1715 Fleet-Queens Jewels found a bronze swivel cannon containing 50 gold and 40 silver coins, said Brent Brisben, 1715 Fleet-Queen's operations manager. He and Schubert, he said, waited to talk about the recent find until after they researched the piece, had it appraised and after Schubert looked a little more for the supposed missing wing.
What happens next? By law, the state of Florida is entitled to 20 percent of the find from each of the company's contracts, but they don't always take that, Brisben said.
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