When the allure of undiscovered treasures beckons, legends like Captain Bill Black of Search and Salvage respond with tales of maritime adventures that leave you in awe. Set sail with us as we discuss the up and downs of the treasure hunter world.
Along Florida's Treasure Coast, pioneers like Captain Bill inspire a community where kinship and competition coexist like the ebb and flow of the tides. Hear about the 1715 fleet , the storied Atocha and other wrecks. We cover topics like underwater archaeology and even poetry as we rediscover that the truest treasures are those we unearth within ourselves. Join us on this expedition of courage, camaraderie, and the undying quest for life’s sunken jewels.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/KtbxLwghgzrTCHhPFbxFgqRXMQDMzJPfvV?projector=1
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1467407956647367/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/699747517028720/
https://www.facebook.com/bill.black.336
https://www.facebook.com/Search-and-Salvage-1002616806476767/
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Salvage-Poems-Captain-Black/dp/B0BZFG4Y25
**The information provided on this podcast does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only. Information on this podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. This podcast contains links to other third party websites. Such links are only for the convenience of the reader, user or browser.
When the allure of undiscovered treasures beckons, legends like Captain Bill Black of Search and Salvage respond with tales of maritime adventures that leave you in awe. Set sail with us as we discuss the up and downs of the treasure hunter world.
Along Florida's Treasure Coast, pioneers like Captain Bill inspire a community where kinship and competition coexist like the ebb and flow of the tides. Hear about the 1715 fleet , the storied Atocha and other wrecks. We cover topics like underwater archaeology and even poetry as we rediscover that the truest treasures are those we unearth within ourselves. Join us on this expedition of courage, camaraderie, and the undying quest for life’s sunken jewels.
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/1/#inbox/KtbxLwghgzrTCHhPFbxFgqRXMQDMzJPfvV?projector=1
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1467407956647367/
https://www.facebook.com/groups/699747517028720/
https://www.facebook.com/bill.black.336
https://www.facebook.com/Search-and-Salvage-1002616806476767/
https://www.amazon.com/Search-Salvage-Poems-Captain-Black/dp/B0BZFG4Y25
**The information provided on this podcast does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice; instead, all information, content and materials available on this site are for general informational purposes only. Information on this podcast may not constitute the most up-to-date legal or other information. This podcast contains links to other third party websites. Such links are only for the convenience of the reader, user or browser.
So are you looking for more inspiration and possibility in midlife and beyond? Join me, leslie Maloney, proud wife, mom, author, teacher and podcast host, as I talk with people finding meaning in moxie in their life after 50. Interviews that will energize you and give you some ideas to implement in your own life. I so appreciate you being here. Now let's get started. Okay, everybody, welcome back to another episode of meeting moxie after 50. And I have with us a real live treasure hunter with us today so fascinating Captain Bill Black, who's somebody I met a few years ago and just has so much knowledge and interesting background that I thought you all would be very much interested in. So welcome, captain Black. Thank you, ma'am. Where?
Speaker 2:is it?
Speaker 1:Captain Bill.
Speaker 2:Just as long as you call me.
Speaker 1:Okay, Okay. Well, what do you like, Captain Bill? Or Captain Black? Where is it?
Speaker 2:Captain Bill's fine.
Speaker 1:Captain Bill All right, so you live in Sebastian Florida. You're Miami-born. I was born in Hollywood, so I can relate. You're a real life Floridian. Moved out to Kansas, did some things out there Sounds like you were really involved a lot with raising different types of animals. So, yeah, you must have some real connections there in terms of animals and what you did. And then found yourself coming back to Florida, sebastian Florida, specifically, in 20, I think it was 2011.
Speaker 2:2006. Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, okay. 2006, your wife moved back to Sebastian and then 2011 is when you started to get into the treasure salvaging business and really today you're considered one of the best in the biz. I think the name of your boat is hold on Search and Salvage is the name of your business it's the name of the company, search and Salvage and you have several boats, some big, some small, and you're getting ready to it sounds like to get 100 footer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's the big one. It's a boat called Samson that's been over in the Bahamas for years and years and years and we're going to bring it over here, refurb it and we'll use it for whatever comes up. It's a big enough platform we can do a lot of things with it. One of the biggest opportunities for me and the biggest reason I started this project to get the boat over here and refurb it. I've been at this for three years getting everything getting it ready to move over here.
Speaker 2:But when Dorian went through the Bahamas and we've had bad hurricanes here, but when it goes through the islands or the terrible flooding they had in Belize, it just seemed to me that this old girl was sitting there and if we had her running a bit for duty we could make some phone calls, loads and supplies, a couple of big generators, maybe an auxiliary stand alone water maker she's got. She'll make a thousand gallons a day now but 7,000 gallons capacity per diesel. So you could run those generators and maybe save some people's lives or at least make them less miserable. So we've kind of got the nonprofit donation chain kind of started set up. We'll never use it unless we need it, but you know as well as I do that the way the weather is, and always has been, it's coming again. It's all cyclical. We didn't think we'd have any hurricanes here for a long time in 04. Then we had what? 05, wilma, with transfer of 05.
Speaker 1:We had three or four in 04 that year. Yeah, Everybody was like what the heck is going on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know, our infrastructure is so much better than it is in most places, and it's way better now than it was in 04 when Francis and Gene came through, so I'd just like to be able to do something that might help people.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:And you know, we'll use her for business until she's needed for an emergency. That's kind of why we're doing it. That's exactly why we're doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, kind of do a double duty kind of thing yeah.
Speaker 2:She'll sleep 10 in cabins, carries 2400 gallons of water and then the water maker. So you know, the two things that they need when bad things go really bad are electricity and clean water. Absolutely. Maybe we can help.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about how you got into treasure salvaging and do people in the treasure salvaging world, do they like to be called treasure hunters or do you can, is that?
Speaker 2:let me start there, well that has to be the game plan, whether you like to. Well, take, for instance, carl out treasure hunters, extraordinary merit because he has half a billion dollars or much more. Carl's married to one of the Walgreens, so you know deep pockets, good people. They decided when Carl was going to, when Carl retired and sold his business, that they were going to just treasure hunt. So he bought an island in the Bahamas called Walker's Key Walker's Key, depending on who you're talking to and Carl bought 160 foot yeah, I think it's a both names accents, it's a dominant and their support votes 170 foot yacht, essentially, which supports his wife. 200 foot yacht which they eat at Walker's.
Speaker 2:So, carl's, you know, hired a bunch of people I think. I've talked to some of them regularly. They've got, I think, five votes working over there on the Northern Bahama Bank and they're finding great stuff on the Maravia shipwreck trail. So 16th, 17th century ship, 1654 I think, when the Maravia ran into another ship and then ran, ran aground and scattered bottom for miles. But, carl's, you know, they're finding great beautiful gold earrings and lots of jewelry and Carl's a treasure hunter. But he doesn't have to sell it. He's not doing it for personal gain. They put it all in a museum in Freeport and they've got a conservation lab and a museum that talks about the entire history of the Bahamas plus the treasure and you know he's a treasure hunter that doesn't have to cash in.
Speaker 2:This is an expensive business, hobby, whichever you prefer, and if there's no monetary return it's hard to throw down anybody's money, whether you're working with partners or investors or just people that believe in what you're doing. It costs $100,000 a year just for our little setup and most years we don't. We probably haven't found more than 35,000, 40,000 in the years, but there's that. You know there's a pile out there and that's why you know why you do it. Most people aren't in it for the monetary return. It's really for the coins and being the first and the finds. You know. It's for the adventure and if you cannot starve to death while you're doing it, it's pretty good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, it is quite the adventure. You know, I think as kids, we all think about that. You know, we've all watched the different movies and you know, finding that and that can be a metaphor for life as well finding the treasure, but how, so how did you find yourself getting into it?
Speaker 2:When I was. So I grew up in the Greyhound business. My grandparents were in Boston in the 30s with eight kids in the dairy business. They were fresh immigrants from Scotland. They had a bunch of kids and the dairy herds that my grandfather and straight together not bought. But well, bruselosis is a bad dairy disease. Cow disease went through and what the procedure was then was they come in and buy all the cows and kill them, because it's a bruselosis keeps cows from having calves, so if it gets in a herd it'll steril, basically sterilize every cow that comes into contact with. So they came in, killed his 20 or 30 cows, gave him $10 a piece when cows cost $100. You know the Congress had announced the Congress had set the price without knowing what cows really cost. So Granddad went out of the cow business, the out of the dairy business, and he was having to work as a gardener, which he was not happy about. The race track opened up next, right down the street, and he had all these buildings on the farm and all these kids. So he rented the kennel space to the guys that came in to race it. The dog track and the kids all worked in the kennels. So this got my father and my uncle's into the business. We ended up here in 19. We ended up in Florida.
Speaker 2:In the early 50s my grandparents, my parents, bought a farm in Kansas. But that's where the farm was in 57, 56. My grandfather was going to run it on by himself and found out how much of work it was. He told Dad Dad had to come to Kansas. Dad packs us all up and off we go. We'd come down here to Fort Lauderdale, key West, and my grandparents lived up around Orlando. We'd visit the length of the coast.
Speaker 2:When I was 11, 11 or 12, we stayed with some friends, the La Croix in Ocala. They had a great place, a thoroughbred farm, and Joe La Croix was partner Dad. The thoroughbred farm had a nice 2000 square foot house on it. For the escorters they had taken two railroad cabousins, put them on a length of track, flanking the house towards the road, cut out the yard. It was really cool. Mother and I stayed in one and my sisters stayed in the other. Then the one we stayed in were two things. There were two books that I remembered distinctly. One of them was Eric Von Donik's first alien book. I don't remember if that's the one where they just mean, oh well, it's not the one where he decided to live inside the Earth, thank God. The other book was the 1960-something National Geographic with all the real-life treasures that I was growing.
Speaker 2:I always wanted to go back to Florida and buy a big shrimp boat, live on the shrimp boat on treasure. When winter gets bad in Kansas, there's not a lot to do. I rodeo in the summer, cut birds in the fall and early winter. Then when February came around, there's nothing to do. If you sit in the house and drink, drink rum and listen to Jimmy Buffett's songs, you can keep your head in nice place. Of course, in an animal agriculture business you work seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. That was my vacation, was trying to eat up and pretend I was someplace else. That kept me through one marriage, two kids. I got divorced when I was about 41. I determined that that point that I had really kind of lost its clove for me. I got remarried in 2002 and 2003. I had about worn everything out. I rode a lot of horses, rode a lot of horses that didn't want to behave, got bucked off a lot, had a few car wrecks.
Speaker 1:Can I stop you for a second? You said you were in the rodeo world too.
Speaker 2:Yeah, from 77 to about 86.
Speaker 1:That's a whole other avenue we could go down. Not a surprise, really kind of fits with the treasure hunting. But go ahead and continue.
Speaker 2:Sort of at the high risk, no reward check, I can say. There's an old saying rodeos been good to me. I started off with nothing and I've got almost half of it left Treasure hunting, much to say, anyway. So I married O'Donnell and after a couple of years my back, my knees, my arms there's a lot of stuff that worked like it should. So she got offered jobs that we could have lived any place in Southeast and it's a great job. She wanted to take it and it paid enough that I could go back to school. So we sold everything in Kansas, moved down here, I went back to college, finished three degrees, one associate's in electronic mechanical engineering technology degree and in operations engineering degree, none of which I'm used on any chance, but I'm better educated. So we spent a year and a half back in Kansas and determined that that wasn't going to happen. So we came back, I bought a big old boat and I used to take spearfishing now and I finally got to meet somebody in the treasure business.
Speaker 2:Because you can't just decide one day that I'm going to go buy a boat and become a treasure hunter in. This world Could have 50 years ago. Now you have to have permits and subcontracts and, honestly, the 1715 fleet and the Atosia Margarita enterprise and the fees. And the only two places in most of the world that you can become a treasure hunter and not get in trouble the Bahamas. There's really only one person permitted to hunt in the Bahamas and that'll be far-reliable.
Speaker 2:Here you can do it, but you first have to get in and learn how things work, what it takes, what you need and what you need is a boat with a crop wash conversion mailbox, some dive gear, some metal detectors and a whole lot of time. It's not, it isn't rocket science, but it is a complex set of variables that you have to solve it every day, and the better you solve those variables the better. You blow in holes in perfect order does not necessarily make sure that you find more treasure, but if your boat operations work smoothly, you will not miss much as you go through the ground that you work and I would think that a couple of things, I think that your engineering degrees probably do come in handy for a lot of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you are using them and I would think, as the technology improves with this, with the searching for the treasure, that you're also, I would think, probably able to understand that a lot easier than somebody who doesn't have that background.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I designed some of it. I fixed almost all of our own, all of our work with the. I'm a good enough boat mechanic now that I can tell people how to fix it. There's a lot of things. You need to be a small engine mechanic, a cook, a diver, a VMT, a boat captain and a diesel mechanic. There's more, but that will cover the first beginning parts of it, Because if you can, at some point you will be doing all of those things.
Speaker 2:You don't have to be great at any of them, but you have to be passable, and we get a lot of people that you know. I've got one guy that's been after me for four months that doesn't know anything about treasure, doesn't know he's a diver, but he's never run a metal detector, but he's convinced that I need to come and bring him in and let him dive in search. You have to know what you're doing. It costs a couple of $300 a day to run that boat, and so you have to put the best people under the boat. What if you put a new guy down there and he's not paying attention and he misses a royal that's worth $600,000? This is the bad time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very, very specialized. I don't think people realize that it's a very, very specialized. It seemed to me to be a very small circle, like a lot of things, once you start to get in and there's a lot of. Everybody seems to kind of know each other kind of thing. And you know, I don't know if I shared this with you when we first met, but my husband and I had a friend he's since passed on Dan Thompson. Yeah, he was one of the pieces of eight. Is that what they call themselves?
Speaker 2:The real eight.
Speaker 1:The real eight and he, you know, we met him as an older man and he started telling us about and for the listeners, just real quick, and I'm sure you know the story way better than I do. But the real eight were just a group of guys that they were divers, they were a lot of them, like Dan was works at Patrick Air Force Base and they were just kind of weekend warriors. And one of them, I guess, knew there was some treasure out there and they started diving, essentially, and they found some of the one of the ships from the 1715 fleet that there was like seven or eight ships that had sunk due to a hurricane. And anyway, it's so funny because so that's how we first learned about this and the history of all the stuff I mean there's, there's no there. Why do they call the Vero area the treasure coast? Because there's a lot of treasure up there.
Speaker 1:And anyway so we knew yeah, we knew his wife and he had a. He had a story and she did too Of one. One day, you know, the guys came back, they, so they started working and they started pulling up all the all the stuff on the weekends and she told a story about you know, they walking in. They were, they were kind of like kids after trick or treating. They were laying out all the all the stuff and she walked into the their living room and said what's going on in here? Because it was all kind of laid out.
Speaker 1:Of course, and that was probably before permitting and all the stuff now. But yeah, just kind of such an interesting story there. Did you anything you wanted to add to that?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a great story. I was. They call that the cabin Brett because if Wagner, who was the originator of relay and recruited all those guys, he had a cabin there at that wreck bought it after they found it and the wreck, or while he was looking for it, and a dentist from Vero ended up living in that cabin. I have a friend of mine asked me to go look at a metal detector for him, metal detector and a flasable boats over on the beach side, and so I did and it was Pete Fallon, dr Pete Fallon, who was a marvelous guy and he had done things to that house. It's just beautiful. There's a.
Speaker 2:There was an article in the the beer, that hero slick, finished hero magazine, that treasure postman, first post living, I think it was. They have a layout on this place, you know, it's so nicely done. There's a four panel stained glass window over the door that come in on the beach side, on the street side, and it shows the ships and the coins and it's just. It's just a greatest story. It's great, greatest treasure story ever. As you know, the atosh is a more dramatic story, you know, with the ship being dragged out over miles and miles and the metal company, looking for so many years and losing so many people.
Speaker 1:That was the keys. Right, that's the keys. And that's with Elf Fisher, right? Okay?
Speaker 2:That mouth found a lot of treasure up here and his family still owns a bit of this of the time to the south of Lisa's up here. The leases are owned by holding a LLC map and happy still has a share of that. But that's where they got their enough confidence and starting capital to go down there and look for 15 years. That's where they found the main pile and you know we run that friend of mine and I have. He started the treasure hunters took out, we moved it over here for more.
Speaker 1:Well, you muted yourself. There we go.
Speaker 2:I don't know how that happened. Oh, it's a boat captain and a friend of mine, but anyway, he I've lost it.
Speaker 1:Where were we? Oh, you were talking about the atosh and you were talking yeah.
Speaker 2:We run this cookout slash treasure hunters reunion. It's been in La Bossa for the last five or six years and most of the people from the atosh and golden cruise, the people that found the main pile in 85, most of them have cycled through the cookout once or twice. Great stories the gentleman that did the research in Spain, that found the atosh and has provided a lot of the background on the set of 15 were Rex Dr Eugene Lyon passed away a couple of three years ago. He was from Vero and we had him. I think that we had him at the right before he passed. We had him up at the at the cookout we did four or five hundred of our closest friends and feed them ribs, raise money for Michael at have a heart foundation which is Taffy and Michael.
Speaker 2:After Taffy Fisher at son he passed away at 13 and suddenly party after rest. So they have a foundation that raises money to educate people and buy a fit that's what I've got. He's portable to purplators for schools. There's a lot more kids that pass away because of sudden party after rest. We have a new, so we raise some money and we have a great time and we.
Speaker 2:The great thing is that we get all these people who never see each other together at least once a year. And you know we've been having a Pimblewood Motor Lodge south of Sebastian but which kept Wagner was the contractor on and Tommy Thompson the treasure hunter. Years the SS Central America ripped off his is a bunch of coins, went on the lamb, as they say, for a few years, was at one time staying at the Pinwood for several months. I've always wondered if he came to one of the cookouts. Tommy's presently spent I believe it's, five years in prison for a contempt of court because he won't tell the judge where he where he hid the money. Oh wow, he's 70 something he's. He seems to be pretty adamant that he's not going to do it Good for him.
Speaker 1:That's a great story. So so this little boy, this little little 11 year old boy who kind of got the bug, is still very much alive and well in you and keeps you, keeps you going in this and of course I mean it sounds like it's an amazing community and, and you know, you get a little hit there, a little hit there and some great, great stories. So so go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, you buff it song. You do it from stories we can tell. Yeah, so one thing here for sure kind of five.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, and some. I you know. It was funny because when my husband and I went to that treasure seminar and we were sitting amongst everybody and I leaned over to him, I said we got some salty dogs in this room and just people who very much live by their own rules, which I love that. I love that.
Speaker 2:It's a real alpha, alpha group. Uh huh, that's. You know, that's probably if you turn a bunch of stallions loose on the on the desert after why he range in Nevada they keep about five miles between themselves unless they want to let somebody's feeling a little frog. You want to fight and that may be why treasure hunters don't get together but once a year, because nobody really wants to be told what to do. There's burnt. Weber lives in San Diego, dominican Republic. He's got the most room, as far as I know, between him and the next guy. But yeah, there's a, it's a real out, it's a real alpha. Every sport I've ever been in rodeo, field trial, bird dogs, even competitive shooting, they're all pretty much out there, pretty much alpha Guys, things.
Speaker 1:So what would be like?
Speaker 2:show.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, no, definitely is not going to track that. So what would be like? What's one of your favorite stories that you like to tell that you that you were involved in, kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Let's see the one.
Speaker 1:So many to choose from.
Speaker 2:Well, and so many of them just seem like a Tuesday. You know, and you get used to a higher level of excitement. There's Our best I guess our best day. I got into the business by working on other people's votes for free. You get a time to get your foot in, you get to know a few people, so you know a few more people in your fights and people that you can get along with. That needs somebody with your talents or at least your equipment. And I got A guy with a guy, an old, real old salt Captain Tim Farrell. And Kim was a real live, old time Smug, grumbling pirate, great guy, has learned his lesson. But Very, very fascinating fella and had kind of had a hard times, didn't have a place to live that wasn't like a storage unit. So I said you should come. You know, come help me on my boat and he ends up living in here at the house for two and a half years. He had Five different kinds of cancers over four years and I think it was hard work and hardest work and treasure hunter I've ever. I've ever known Kim.
Speaker 2:If you knew it wasn't it was too rough to go out. Kim would still get everything loaded up on the boat and go make sure that you couldn't work. So we had been on the trail yes, you know him in the village, a debris trail for a while and there was another boat that was on an intersecting path. They were methodically working this way and we were methodically working. We were a fixin' to collide. So I'd suggested that we go to a couple of spots that we had wanted to check out and that were going to be in this other guy's path. We just as well clean it out before we get there, because we're just gonna skip ahead on our trail. And, long story short, they found 54 points that day and the competing boat made things as difficult as possible. And Kim was. He was really kind of at his weakest point physically, but his strongest point, by God. We showed them and that got him back on top. He had been looking a long time and not finding very much until we got together and we had.
Speaker 2:That was our best year. He was living across the street from the marina in Mecco. Marina just happened to have a bar. Kim was a real fan of double roaming boats and we laid all this treasure out there at the bar in one of the shelter houses, and Kim got the whole court for three or four hours. People buy and drinks. He was just in his element. Top of the game, we found a few more points. In the next few days, weather pretty much flowed to south. Kim passed away about six weeks later, but he went out on top he it was, you know, as a crappy ending to a summer. As far as him passing away, we found him unconscious in his house. He knew he wouldn't be back, so we sat and he loved this. We got all the rum out of the house and sat on his front steps and drank it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, he passed with his boots on. He passed with his boots on.
Speaker 2:Well, in Kim's case, it would have been flippers. Yeah yeah, with his flippers on. But that and it's not the most treasure we found or I found, but it was that he taught me pretty much all I know. I've learned some sense, but he passed in 17. He taught me how to do this and that I could give that back to him. There you go again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, full circle. So explain to our listeners, when you find treasure like that and I know that there's kind of like permits you get permits from the state because the state got involved in this at some point, which I know there's a little bit of a tenuous relationship there between the Salvador's and the state and all that which we can go into but just initially. So you apply for a permit, kind of thing, and you're allowed to search within a certain perimeter. Is that how it works?
Speaker 2:Sort, of Fisher. No, fisher got the leases, got the bought the leases from the real aid corporation. Mel did a bunch of work to prove up those leases in Admiralty Quarter and they they made sure that they arrested the WREX, which is an Admiralty term where they take possession of the WREX sites and basically manage them for maximum profit. The state, oddly enough, has what they call submerged lands. The state owns the bottom of the river. If the state owns the property on both sides of the river, they own the bottom of the river. I don't know what the inland rules are, but in the on the our side it's three miles out, the state owns the bottom three miles out and on the north side I think it's nine. So anything that you want to do to the bottom of the ocean, whether you have clam leased or a treasure leased, you have to pay the state a sum of it. So Mel got the leases negotiated and renegotiated them, proved up on the Admiralty, had them until, say, 2008 or 10, probably 2010. Then they sold them to a group of guys that performed LLC. They own the lease. They subcontract with people like me and Mike Pernah, mike Penninger, the Schmitz it's on and on. It's about 25 bucks.
Speaker 2:We get a subcontract, we can go wherever we want Within the leases the area of the leases that Queens Jewels 1715, queens Jewels LLC owns, and they have the. There's a lot of people that don't think it's fair that the company gets half. The rules go that the state can take 20% of the artifacts and treasures found on each lease site and that's 20%. Whether they want all of my stuff, which comes to 20% of everything that's been found, or all of your stuff, or 20% of everybody's, or you're like coming up to 20% of everything that's been found, and then we slip with the company 50-50. And folks say that sounds like too much. But we don't have to hire any lawyers, we don't have to worry about the Department of Environmental Protection, the FWC, the Army Corps of Engineers or the state of Florida, because they deal with all of those issues.
Speaker 1:The state does Okay. Well the Queens Jewels does. Queens Jewels does. Oh, okay, gotcha.
Speaker 2:So they deal with everybody, the state because of the submersion lands, long you really can't. You know that goes back to the citizens of Florida. So really that is the way it is and Queens Jewels, the company, keeps us out of. I haven't been bussed with the legalish, so it's their partners to citizens of.
Speaker 2:Florida. So we can hunt any place, any of the wreck sites, from Sebastian Enlent pretty much down to St Lucia where there's, I believe there's nine different areas the cabin wreck, the anchor of the cannon this is going south from Sebastian Enlent the spring of Whitby, which is an 1812, 1811 wreck, 1810. Then there's a 1600s Honduran wreck there called the Green Cabin that the restaurant in the Disney Resort down there is named the Green Cabin restaurant after that that wreck. Then there's Corrigans Cabin and Corrigans are two of the best producers. Then there's another wreck off of Rio Mar, the golf course on the south side of Vero. Another one north of Fort Pierce at Sandy Point. Another one south of Fort Pierce. It's been a big dome producer called Ramon Al-Maham. We call it colored beach. Then there are two more wreck sites down by the power plant, just south of the nuclear power plant down by St Louis.
Speaker 1:Are those established sites like you have? Are those suspected? These are, those are all sites where stuff has been found and it's established there. Okay, because I know there's a whole other thing about this. What people suspect and the state is really correct me if I'm wrong the state is pretty stingy with allowing new leases anymore. Is that true?
Speaker 2:Stingy would be a very concrete, but they will not allow a new salvage lease. As far as we could tell, they've not given one to anybody since the 80s.
Speaker 1:Wow. So it's sort of like. What you're describing, then, is it's almost like you know how, like when a restaurant gets an alcohol, a license to sell alcohol, and then it's pat, they only give so many out and that's passed down through the family and that kind of thing. So it's a similar thing, like these things were given out in the 80s and then you all sort of have to. That's what you're dealing, that's what you're legally allowed to, where you're allowed to go. Would that be a correct?
Speaker 2:way. Yeah, we're basically grandfathered in the idea that the archeologists have gotten these days is that anybody that does anything for a profit is bad. The archeologists, the underwater archeologists, marine cultural heritage specialists I think they call themselves now, if they join the clubs, the association, the professional marine underwater archeologists or whatever the day, they have to sign a code of ethics that says they will not work with commercial salvage. The reason being is because the public we need the public find the wrecks and the archeologists come in to salvage. Archeologists only produce paperwork research. So I assume that they're afraid that if we find all the wrecks in salvage, there won't be anything left for underwater archeologists to find in 2140. So it's a little like the self eternally when they call it long brain, when a perpetual motion machine that judges. Lawyers become legislators who make laws and rules that other lawyers have to talk about in front of another lawyer. That's a judge. So it's kind of a self-grooming cat Really. It's everybody wins, except for the people who have to pay the lawyers as the judges. I guess the lawyers generally pay the judges, so to speak, but they will not.
Speaker 2:For instance, bobby Fritchard found seven or ten wrecks up around the narrow. One of them was a French wreck at French artifacts in French broad scanners from the 1500s On it. They got pictures of them. They had gotten an exploration lease from the state of Florida. The state of Florida said that if they found any wrecks they would give them a salvage permit. Bobby raised and spent $3 million running a huge high-quality survey there off of Canaveral. They found all sorts of wrecks, including this very cool French wreck that has on it the marble columns they have pictures of this the marble columns that the Spanish, after they wiped out the colony the Spanish, as far as I know, or Bobby has told me, they were taking these marble columns back to Spain to be, I assume, sent back to the French with the big signs that stay out of force. They wiped out several hundreds of Ugoanots that the French and Lutherans, the French Protestants that moved in there. Bobby found it, Bronze cannons worth hundreds of thousands turned in all of his results, just like he was supposed to.
Speaker 2:The state decided that they were going to take. First, they wouldn't give him a salvage permit. Secondly, they took all of his information and gave it to France. France sued in Federal Court or International Court, I guess Federal Court to get title to the wreck. They didn't have anything to do with it. Bobby had spent $3 million in his and other people's money to do the survey and find it. That's the real issue is they come in and they take your work brought up and don't reimburse you If somebody had paid for the survey. France wants it. Give us the reimbursement for the work we did to find your wreck. They just take.
Speaker 2:Archaeologists are always underfunded, but then again they generally only write things for other archaeologists. Now I know several. I know a couple of commercial archaeologists Rob Westeros, great Jim Sinclair, fabulous underwater archaeologist Excuse me Michael Pateman in the Bahamas. I can name three or four more. They're just Duncan Matheson, corey Malcolm, corey Perkella here at the McClarty. Very, very, very talented people that do great work, but they work in the framework of commercial salvage. They're the academics that don't like that kind of commercial influence. They'd rather get a grant than a paycheck.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it sounds like it's too bad that there can't be more working together on this, because there's so much, there's so much out there, there's so much and it's our history. Then everybody can benefit.
Speaker 2:What the present thing is. They call it in set to preservation, which means let it rot. Gold is not affected by salt water for time. Silver is. You've seen silver coins that we saw at our seminar, silver coins that have been in the water for 300 years don't look all that good anymore. Woods rotting away, the ceramics getting broken into smaller and smaller pieces. At a certain point it all becomes sand, except for the gold coins. Mine made of gold. As Mel said, gold shines forever.
Speaker 2:Nothing it's as unheard as anything gets. But eventually there won't be any archaeological record left. But they would prefer that that happened rather than people like me get our hands on it and distribute it. Most of the time it goes to collectors who are amateur archaeologists. They document, they research their purchases and they display them in their homes, which people call it a private museum. But we're not here for a long time. We just hold on to it while we're here and pass it on to somebody else. We're caretakers.
Speaker 2:I wrote a little book of poetry. Oddly enough, one of my favorite poems that I've written. It's about a ballast rock. We go through the life cycle of a ballast stone that sits on my desk over there From the time that it was formed. Then it became. It got shoved up onto the surface and water flowed over. It turned out to be a nice brown rock. Somebody picked it up one day and threw it in a rabbit, because that's how you kill the rabbit. So you got food. You threw the rocks out. The rock persisted. Next time somebody picked it up, they were looking for stones to ballast the ship. That rock traveled from, basically from four billion years ago to my desk and it will travel some of us. You know, when I'm gone, somebody will probably either throw it in the ocean or make a garden out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of ballast, rock garden Beautiful description how it comes full circle for sure. So I mean we could just keep going here. I want to respect your time. There's so much to talk about.
Speaker 2:We can do this again if you want, yeah.
Speaker 1:I would love that and I think people would be interested. There's so many different directions to go. You've written some books, right, haven't you written some? Just one, okay, you have the one on the poster I've published one, yeah, okay.
Speaker 2:So search and salvage the poems of Captain Bill White on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Okay, all right, and I will make sure to put that in the show notes and so anybody who's interested can look that up and go to Amazon to get that. I'm sure that's very insightful and interesting and any other ways that people can connect with you that you're out there.
Speaker 2:We're big on Facebook. Okay, you can find your Facebook. Bill Black in Sebastian Florida for search and salvage. Okay, we have a page for our Samson restoration project. I post pretty often. You know we, if somebody wants to join in and follow along with some skin in the gang, we do take backers. It's not an investment, it's a donation with the possibility of getting something back. Actually, what I do is I sell a percentage of what we find.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:All right If we find a thousand poems you're going to get I don't know 40 years or 50, something You'll get, you know, with one percent you get five points, Sometimes you get a piece of pottery, Sometimes you get a hearty thank you, but you get to be involved at some level that doesn't take all your time and put your marriage in dangerous waters sometime. My wife often says if you notice how all your friends are divorced, Well, everybody, I think, wants to be a part of treasure hunting.
Speaker 1:You know that, like I said, that's like the little kid in us is, just so you know what treasures can we find. I always like to end the podcast with this question. So what does a meaningful, moxie filled life look like to you, and also how does it feel?
Speaker 2:Do as much as you can for other people without starving yourself. Stay away from emotional vampires. Stay away from financial vampires. Find the thing that you want to do and then enable yourself to do it. Most of the reason that people don't get what they want is because they don't ask for it. One of my favorite little idioms is if you don't ask for what you want, don't be surprised if you don't get it. And that in marriage, in business, in your working life, and sometimes you have to ask yourself what is it that you know? What is it I want this? How do I go about it? I'm a big fan of plans. No plan survives first contact with the enemy or the first Monday, but you just keep iterating. And I've done. You could call me sort of an ADD person.
Speaker 2:I was a drag racer in high school. In college I moved back to the farm. There weren't any drag racers around. I'd ridden horses all my life because we traded horses. When I was a kid I went to a couple of ropens and said this will work and spent the next nine years rodeoing and then fell my shoulder with me. Well, I decided it was time to do something else. I like hunting quail, so I had a few bird dogs. They run bird dogs in front of horses. It's called horseback field trials. Well, when you've got nine horses and it's a bird dog, you'd already set up to go. Did that till I got divorced, then went back to just riding and trading horses for a while, not to where I couldn't do that physically because I'd make too many judgmental errors. Is this horse ready to ride? Sure, I wouldn't know that grade if riding I guess I was pretty good at training.
Speaker 2:But when I was 50, I decided I was going to change my life completely and did and that's sometimes the worst. I've been broke three or four times, got a little poem in the book about that and every time I just you kind of crawl out of it. You look around and say, okay, well, that didn't work and put your life back together and you have to take those risks. You have to be willing to take the hit if you take that risk. But the reward for taking the risk is the life that other people look at and say, wow, I might do that. And that's kind of where I wanted to be. I've been blessed with being around the right time and being able to find the right kind of people to let me do it.
Speaker 2:And a wife well, actually two wives. First wife was she was never averse to whatever it was I was doing. I didn't understand it. Well, of course, my second, my friend's life is awesome. I don't really understand it either.
Speaker 2:You don't find a lot of women in the treasured list. It's too much of a risk. Women just by their nature not that they're bad, it's probably smarter, because if you have two people in a relationship and both of them were big risk takers, you could end up sleeping on the beach. You're twice as. You're twice as liable to end up sleeping on the beach.
Speaker 2:So you balance each other out. Yeah, you really do, and that's why men and women got to me this way. We're a balancing act. Some people, a lot of people, don't understand and I'm sure that you do that being married the most perfect person in the world ain't that good every day. Sometimes it's months when you're just not real happy, but you get out of that and you work your way through it and then you're back with that person that you mean so much to you. Right, but if you just keep selling them, if you get a horse half broke and keep selling them, you're never going to get the one to walk. So that's kind of what it looks like to me is just keep trying and don't be afraid.
Speaker 1:I love it, words to live by and you definitely are somebody that have lived on your own terms and there's a lot of people that wish they had, so you're a great example for that, for so many Thank you.
Speaker 2:Thank you, if you want to do, if you'd like to fill in some spots between now and whenever you decide to put this up, we can do this again. I enjoy it. Okay, since I know we're not going to be doing a video, we're a lot happier. I don't have to get the makeup artist next time, okay.
Speaker 1:I'll get out of this now. Well, listen, thank you so so much. I really, really appreciate this. I'm going to sign off with the listeners and then we can keep talking, but thanks everybody for listening and looking the show notes and you can get more information about Captain Bill Black and all his adventures.
Speaker 2:Thank, you Take care.
Speaker 1:Talk soon. If this podcast was valuable to you, it would mean so much if you could take 30 seconds to do one or all of these three things, or subscribe to the podcast and, while they're, leave a review and then maybe share this with a friend if you think they'd like it in a world full of lots of distractions, I so appreciate you taking the time to listen in. Until next time, be well and take care.