Meaning and Moxie After 50
Looking for more inspiration and possibility in midlife and beyond? Join host Leslie Maloney, proud wife, mom, author and teacher, as she talks with people finding Meaning and Moxie in their life after 50.
Meaning and Moxie After 50
#4 of Top Ten from 2024/Sunken Dreams and Golden Discoveries: The Treasure Hunter’s Tale
What if the thrill of the treasure hunt wasn't just about finding gold and silver, but about the life stories and adventures that shape us along the way? I sit down with Captain Bill Black, a true pioneer in the world of treasure salvaging. From humble beginnings on a Kansas farm to the sun-soaked beaches of Florida's Treasure Coast, Captain Bill shares his journey of chasing dreams and uncovering hidden fortunes. His tales of camaraderie, resilience, and the powerful spirit of adventure reveal the true treasures beneath the waves and within the heart of the treasure-hunting community.
In an episode brimming with inspiration, Captain Bill's adventures highlight the importance of preparedness, technical prowess, and the courage to pursue one's passions. He shares his ambitious plans for the Samson, a 100-foot boat designed for disaster relief, underscoring the vital role of readiness in facing natural challenges. With stories from his diverse career path, Captain Bill invites us into a world where risk-taking leads to a life rich with meaning and admiration. Don't miss this captivating conversation that celebrates the magic of adventure and the invaluable lessons from a life well-lived.
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https://www.facebook.com/bill.black.336
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https://www.amazon.com/Search-Salvage-Poems-Captain-Black/dp/B0BZFG4Y25
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Hi everybody, it's Leslie and we are on number four this week of our top 10 countdown of our favorites from 2024. And today we are diving into the thrilling world of treasure hunting re-diving, I guess, with Captain Bill Black of Search and Salvage where history, mystery and adventure collide along Florida's legendary treasure coast. We'll explore in this conversation the triumphs, the challenges and the sheer courage that it takes to chase life's hidden gems through tales of underwater archaeology, maritime poetry and a community that is bound by camaraderie and competition. We'll discover that really, the greatest treasures aren't always gold. They're the stories, the lessons and the resilience that we uncover along the way. Hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1: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 Media 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, or is it Captain Bill?
Speaker 2:Just as long as you call me.
Speaker 1:OK, ok. Well, what do you like, captain Bill, or Captain Black, or 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 born. Uh, I was born in hollywood so I can relate. You're a real life floridian. Um moved out to kansas, did some things out there.
Speaker 1:Sounds like you were really involved a lot with raising different types of animals um so you yeah, you must have have some uh 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. And 2006.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:OK, oh OK. 2006,. You and 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. 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 a hundred 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, refurbish 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 refurbish. 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, you know, make some phone calls, load some supplies, a couple of big generators, maybe an auxiliary stand-alone water maker, which she's got. She'll make a thousand, I think a thousand gallons a day now but 7,000 gallons capacity for diesel. So you could run those generators and, you know, maybe save some people's lives or at least make them less miserable. So we've kind of got the non-profit donation chain kind of started set up. We'll never use it unless we need it.
Speaker 2:But you know as well as I do that the way weather is and always has been, it's coming again. It's all cyclical. Yes, always has been. It's coming again. You know, it's all cyclical. Yes, we, we didn't think we'd have any hurricanes here for a long time in 04, and then we had what one in what? Oh five, wilma, we ran through of oh five, so we had three and what three or four in 04 that year?
Speaker 1: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 2004 when Francis and Gene came through. So I just like to be able to do something that might help people, and you know, we'll use her for business until she is needed for an emergency. That's kind of why we're doing it. That's exactly why we're doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, kind of do a double duty kind of thing yeah she'll sleep 10 in cabins, carries 2,400 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:Maybe we can help. Yeah, yeah. So let's talk a little bit about how you got in to treasure salvaging. How you got in to treasure salvaging and is do you treasure? Do people in the treasure salvaging?
Speaker 2:were world. Do they like to be called game plan, whether you like to? Well, take, for instance, carl out treasure hunter. That's extraordinary because he has half a billion dollars or much more, and carl's married to one of the walgreens, so you know deep pockets, good people. Um, they decided when carl was going to when carl uh retired and sold his business, stole his business, that they were going to just treasure hunt. So he bought an island in the Bahamas called Walker's Key Walker's Cave, depending on who you're talking to and Carl bought a 160-foot yeah, I think it's a boat's name is Axis of Sodom, and their support boat is a 170-foot yacht essentially which supports his wife's 200-foot yacht which they keep at Walker's.
Speaker 2:And Carl's hired a bunch of people I think. I've talked to some of them regularly. They've got, I think, five boats working over there on the northern Bahama Bank and they're finding great stuff on the Maravilla Shipwreck Trail shipwreck trail, so 16th, 17th century ship 16, 54 I think, when the Maravilla ran into another ship and then ran a ground and scattered its bottom for miles. But, carl's, you know they're finding great beautiful gold earrings and lots of jewelry. And Carl's a, 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. He's not selling 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, he's a treasure hunter that doesn't have to cash in.
Speaker 2:Um, this is an expensive, expensive business, hobby, whichever you prefer, and if you, if there's no monetary return, it's hard to throw down anybody's money, whether you're working with with partners or investors or or people that you know believe in what you're doing. You know 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 a year, but there's a pile out there and that's why you do it. Most people aren't in it for the monetary return. It's really for the coins and being the person that finds them, you know it's for the adventure and if you cannot starve to death while you're doing it, it's pretty good yeah, well, it is quite the adventure, you know.
Speaker 1:I think, as we, we, as kids, we all think about that. You know, we've all watched the different movies and you know, finding that, and, and, and, that can be a metaphor for life as well. Um, finding the treasure, um, but how, so how did you find yourself getting into it?
Speaker 2:what I was. So I grew up in the greyhound business. My grandparents, um, 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 herd that my grandfather and straight together grandfather and straight together Got bought by. Well, brucellosis a bad dairy disease, cow disease went through and what the procedure was then was they'd come in and buy all the cows and kill them, because it's a brucellosis keeps cows from having calves, so if it gets in a herd it'll basically sterilize every cow it comes into contact with. So they came in, killed his 20 or 30 cows, gave him $10 apiece when cows cost $100. 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, out of the dairy business, and he was having to work as a gardener, which he was not happy about. The racetrack 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 at the dog track and the kids all worked in the kennels. So this got my father and my uncles into the business.
Speaker 2:We ended up here in 19. We ended up in Florida. In the early 50s my grandparents and my parents bought a farm in Kansas because that's where the farm was in 57, 56. My grandfather was going to run it all by himself. He found out how much of work it was. He told dad dad had to come to Kansas. So dad packs us all up and off we go and we'd come down here to Fort Lauderdale, key West, and my grandparents lived up around Orlando and we'd visit the length of the coast.
Speaker 2:When I was 11 or 12, we stayed with some friends, the La Croix's in Ocala, and they had a great place at Thoroughbred farm and Joe La Croix was partner dad. The Thoroughbred farm had a nice 2,000 square footare-foot house on it and for the escorters they had taken two railroad cabooses, put them on a length of track, flanking the house right towards the road, cut out the yard. It was really cool. Mother and I stayed in one and my sister stayed in the other, and then the one we stayed in were two things. There were two books that I remember distinctly. One of them was Eric Von Donaghan's Alien. First Alien book. I don't remember if that's the one where they oh, it's not the one where he decided they lived inside the Earth, thank god. But the other book was the 1960 something, uh, national geographic, with all the real eight treasures in it and I was ruined.
Speaker 2:Um, I always wanted to go back to florida and buy a big shrimp boat, live on the shrimp boat and hunt treasure. So when winter gets bad in Kansas, there's not a lot to do. So I'd rodeo in the summer, hunt birds in the fall and early winter. But then when February came around, there's nothing to do winter. But then when February came around, there's nothing to do. But if you sit in the house and drink rum and listen to Jimmy Buffett songs, you can keep your head in a nice place. And of course, in an animal agriculture business you work seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. So that was my vacation was turn the heat up and pretend I was someplace else. So that kept me through one marriage. Two kids got divorced when I was about 40. And I determined at that point that Kansas had really kind of lost its glow for me. I got remarried in 2002.
Speaker 1:And 2003.
Speaker 2:Sorry about that 2003. And 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? So you said you were in the rodeo world too. Yeah, from 77 to about 86 okay, that's a whole other avenue we could go, go down but, not not a surprise. Really kind of fits with the treasure hunting. But go ahead and go ahead and continue sort of at the high risk, no reward.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, there's an old saying rodeos have been good to me. I started off with nothing and I've got almost half of it left Treasure hunting, much the same, but anyway. So I married O'Donnell and after a couple of years, my back, my knees, my eyes there's a lot of stuff that doesn't work like it should. So she got offered a job to come to that you could have lived any place in Southeast and it's a great job. She wanted to take it and they had 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 an operations engineering degree, none of which I've used on anything. That made a profit, but I'm better educated, made a profit, but I'm better educated. So my, we spent a year and a half back in Kansas and determined that that wasn't going to happen. So we came back, I started, I used, I bought a big old boat and I used to take spearfishing out and I finally got to meet somebody in the treasure business, 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.
Speaker 2:Now you have to have permits and subcontracts and, honestly, the 1715 fleet and the atosha margarita enterprise in the keys 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 would be Carl Allen. Here you can do it, but first you have to get in and learn how things work, what it takes, what you need and what you need is a boat with a crockwash, 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 every day, and the better you solve those variables, the better. Youowing 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're working Okay.
Speaker 1:Go ahead and I would think that a couple of things. I think that your engineering degrees probably do come in handy, um, for a lot of this. Yeah, so you are using them and I would think, as the technology uh, improves with this, with the searching of the 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 equipment. 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 DMT, a boat captain and a diesel mechanic. Oh, there's more, but that'll cover the first beginning parts of it, because if you can, at some point you will be doing all of those things. You don't have to be great at any of them, but you have to be passive, and we get a lot of people that you know.
Speaker 2:I've got one guy that's been after me for four months that doesn't know anything about treasure hunting, 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 and search, dive and search. You have to know what you're doing. It costs a couple $300 a day to run that boat, and so you have to put the best people under the boat looking. What if you put a new guy down there and he has? He's not paying attention and he misses a royal? It's worth six hundred thousand dollars. This is a bad time yeah, it's very, very specialized.
Speaker 1:I don't think people realize that it's a very, very specialized. It seemed to me, um, to be a very small circle when you and like, like a lot of things, once you start to get in them, there's a, there's a lot of. You know, 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 who's since passed on, dan Thompson, who was one?
Speaker 1:Yeah, he was one of the pieces of eight. Is that what they call themselves pieces?
Speaker 1:really really really, really, and he, you know, we, we met him as an older, older man and he started telling us about and for 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. So so that's how we first learned about this and 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?
Speaker 1:Because there's a lot of treasure out there 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 stuff and she walked into their living room and said what the heck's going on in here? Because it was all kind of laid out Of course that was probably before permitting and all the stuff now.
Speaker 1: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 wreck because Kip Wagner, who was the originator of Relay and recruited all those guys, he had a cabin there at that wreck. He bought it after they found it the wreck, or while he was looking for it, and a dentist from Vero ended up living in that cabin. A friend of mine asked me to go look at a metal detector for him, metal detector on an inflatable boat over on the beach side. 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.
Speaker 2:There was an article in that Slick Finish Hero magazine, that Treasure Coast magazine, treasure Coast Living, I think it was, and they have a layout on this place. It's, you know, it's so nicely done. There's a four-panel stained glass window over the door that you come in, not the beach side but on the street side, and it shows the ships and the coins and it's just. It's just the greatest story, it's the greatest treasure story ever. As you know, the Atosha is a more dramatic story, you know, with the ship being dragged out over miles and miles and the mail company looking for so many years, losing so many people.
Speaker 1:That was the Keys, right, that's the Keys. And that's with Mel Fisher, right? Okay?
Speaker 2:Mel found a lot of treasure up here and his family still owns a bit of this of the leases up here and his family still owns a bit of this of the time for this sudden leases up here. The leases are are owned by holding a LLC now and half he still has a share of that. But that's where they got there enough confidence and starting capital to go down there and look for 15 years before they found the main pile and that you know we run that friend of mine and I have. He started the Treasure Hunters Bookout. 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, a friend of mine, but anyway he I've lost it. Where were we?
Speaker 1:Oh, you were. Well, we were talking about the Atosha.
Speaker 2:And you were talking. Yeah, oh, you were talking about the Atosha. Yeah, 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 Atosha and Golden Crew 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 atosha and has provided a lot of the background on the 1715 rex, dr eugene line, passed away a couple of three years ago.
Speaker 2: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 uh. At the cookout we'd get three or four, five hundred of our closest friends and feed them ribs. Raise money for uh.
Speaker 2:Michael at uh have a heart foundation which is taffy and michael apt and taffyon's son who passed away at 13 in a sudden cardiac arrest. They have a foundation that raises money to educate people and buy AFibs or AFibs that's what I've got portable defibrillators for schools. There's a lot more kids that pass away because of sudden cardiac arrest than we ever knew. So we raise some money and we have a great time. The great thing is that we get all these people who never see each other together at least once a year.
Speaker 2:And you know, and we've been having a pinwood motor lodge south of Sebastian, but which Kip Wagner was the contractor on, oddly enough, and Tommy Thompson, the treasure hunter who has found the SS Central America, ripped off a bunch of the coins, went on the lam, 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. 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 contempt of court because he won't tell the judge where he hid the money. Oh wow, he's 77. 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 this little boy, this little 11-year-old boy who kind of got the bug, is still very much alive and well in you and keeps you going in this and of course I mean it sounds like it's an amazing community and you know, you get a little hit there, a little hit there and some great, great stories. So go ahead.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, you know, Buffett song, you do it for the stories we can tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because that's the one thing you're for sure going to find. Yes, yes, tell, yeah, so that's the one thing you're for sure gonna find. 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 for sure, and just people who, who very much live by their own rules, which I love that. I love that.
Speaker 2:It's a real alpha group. That's probably if you turn a bunch of stallions loose on the desert out in the Wahoo range in Nevada. They keep about five miles between themselves unless they want to, unless somebody's feeling a little froggy and wants 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 Burt Weber, who lives in Santa Domingo, dominican Republic, really wants to be told what to do. There's Bert Weber who lives in Santa Domingo, dominican Republic. He's got the most room, as far as I know, between him and the next guy. 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 alpha guy things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what would be like Followers don't 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 were involved in, kind of thing?
Speaker 2:Let's see.
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. Uh, there's, uh, our best I guess our best day. The guy that I got into the business by working on other people's boats for free. You get kind of get your foot in, you get to know a few people, so you know a few more people. Then you find some people that you can get along with. That needs something, that needs somebody with your talent or at least your equipment.
Speaker 2:And I got together with a guy, an old, real old salt Captain, kim Farrell. And Kim was a real live, old-time smug, gruggling pirate, great guy, had learned his lesson, but very, very fascinating fella. He had gotten cancer and had kind of had 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 here at the house for a couple, two and a half years. He had, uh, five different kinds of cancers over four years and hardest working treasure hunter I've ever known. Kim, if you knew 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.
Speaker 2:So we had been on the trail of 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 fixing to collide. So I suggested that we go to a couple of spots that we had wanted to check out and that we're going to be in this other guy's path. We just as well clean it out before we get there, because it's you know, we're just going to skip ahead on our trail. And, long story short, they found 54 points that day and the competing vote made things as difficult as possible.
Speaker 2:And Kim was he was really kind of at his 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, we got and that got him back on top. You know he had been looking a long time and not finding very much until we got together and we had. You know that was our best year. He was living across the street from the marina in Mikko. Marina just happened to have a bar.
Speaker 2:Kim was a real fan of double running posts and we laid all this treasure out there at the bar under one of the shelter houses and Kim got the whole court for three or four hours people buying drinks he was just in his element. Top of the game, we found a few more coins. In the next few days, Weather pretty much closed us out. Kim passed away about six weeks later.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Okay, but he went out on top.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:He, but he went out on top. It was a crappy ending to a summer as far as him passing away. We found him unconscious in his house. Knew he wouldn't be back, so we sat and he loved this. We got all the rum out of the house. Knew he wouldn't be back, so we sat and he loved this. We got all the rum out of the house, sat on his front steps and drank it.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, he went, he passed with his boots on, Passed with his boots on Snort well, in Kim's case it would have been flippers. Yeah, yeah, with his flippers on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's and it's not the most treasure we found or I found, but it was that you know. 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. Here you go, kim.
Speaker 1:Here's the spot, full circle. Explain to our listeners when you, when you find treasure like that, um and I know that there's kind of like permits you're 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 salvagers 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, sort of.
Speaker 2:Mel Fisher got the leases, bought the leases from the Real Aid Corporation. Mel did a bunch of work to prove up those leases in Admiralty Court. The wrecks which is an admiralty term where they take possession of the wreck 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 on our side it's three miles out. The state owns the bottom three miles out, and on the Gulf side I think it's nine. So anything that you want to do to the bottom of the ocean, whether you have clam leaves or a treasure lease, you have to pay the state something.
Speaker 2:So Mel got the leases negotiated, renegotiated them, proved up on the Admiralty, had them until, say, 2008 or 10. Probably 2010. 8 or 10, probably 2010. Then they sold them to a group of guys that formed an LLC and they own, they subcontract with people like me, mike Perna, mike Peninger, the Schmitz, it's on and on and on. There's about 25 of us.
Speaker 2:We get a subcontractor, we can go wherever we want within the leases, the area of the leases that Queen's Jewels 1715 Fleet-Queenens Jewels LLC owns. There's a lot of people that don't think it's fair that the company gets half, 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 are coming up to 20% of everything that's been found. And then we split 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.
Speaker 2:Well.
Speaker 1:Queens-Jules does. Queens-jules does. Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 2:So they deal with everybody, the state, because of the submersion lands law. You really can't. You know that goes back to the citizens of Florida. So really that is the way it is, and Queen's Jewels, the company, keeps us out of the bus with the legal issue. So it's their partners, so to speak. So we can hunt any place, any of the wreck sites, from Sebastian Inlet pretty much down to St Lucie Inlet, I believe.
Speaker 2:There's nine different areas the Cabin Wreck, the Anchor, the Cannon this is going south from Sebastian Inlet. The Spring of Whitby, which is an 1812 and 11 wreck uh, it can. Then there's a 1600s honduran wreck there called the green cabin. That the uh restaurant in the disney resort down there is named the green cabin restaurant in the Disney Resort down there is named the Green Cabin Restaurant After that that wreck. Then there's Corrigan's Cabin and Corrigan's 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 the big gold producer called um um. 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? Are those suspected? Those are all sites where stuff has been found and it's established back there. Okay, because I know there's a whole other thing about what people suspect and the state is really correct me if I'm wrong. The state is pretty stingy with allowing new leases anymore. They don't is that true.
Speaker 2:Stingy would be a very kind trait, but they will not allow new salvage leases. As far as we can tell, they've not given one to anybody since the eighties.
Speaker 1:Wow. So. So it's sort of like. What you're describing, then, is it's almost like you know how, like when, when a restaurant gets an alcohol license to sell alcohol and then it's pat, they only give so many out and it'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 archaeologists have got these days is that anybody that does anything for a profit is bad. The archaeologists, the underwater archaeologists, marine cultural heritage specialists, I think they call themselves now, if they join the club, the association, the professional marine underwater archaeologists, the social club, whatever they are, 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, the public, find the wrecks and the archaeologists come in to salvage them. Archaeologists only produce paperwork, research. We find all the wrecks and salvage them. There won't be anything left for underwater archaeologists to find in 2171 or 2140.
Speaker 2:Eternal, what they call it bomb brain, 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. You know, everybody wins, except for the people who have to pay the lawyers and the judges. I guess the lawyers generally pay the judges, so to speak, but there's they will not.
Speaker 2:For instance, bobby Richard found seven or ten wrecks up around Canaveral. One of them was a French wreck. It had French artifacts and French bronze cannons 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 sign that said stay out of Florida Because they wiped out several hundred of the Huguenots, the French Lutherans, the French Protestants that moved in there. So Bobby found it, bronze cannons worth hundreds of thousands, turned in all of his results just like he was supposed to, and the state decided that they were going to take. First, they wouldn't give him the salvage permitage permit and secondly they took all of his information and gave it to France and France sued in federal court or international for, I guess, federal court to get title to the rat. They didn't have anything to do with it. Bobby had spent three million dollars of his and other people's money to do the survey and find it. And that's the real issue is they come in and they take your work product and don't reimburse you. If somebody had paid for the survey, france know. If France wants it, you know, reimburse us for the work we did to find your wreck. They just take. Yeah, it's.
Speaker 2:Archaeologists are always underfunded, but then again they generally only write things for other archaeologists. Now I will. There are, I know several. I know a couple of commercial archaeologists Rob Westrick's great. Jim Sinclair, fabulous underwater archaeologist Excuse me Michael Pateman in the Bahamas. I can name three or four more that are just you know, duncan Mathewson, corey Malcolm, corey Perkella, out here at the McLarty Very, very, very talented people that will that do great work, but they will work. They work in the framework of commercial salvage and the academics don't like that kind of commercial influence.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:They'd rather get a grant than a paycheck.
Speaker 1:It sounds like it's too bad that there can't be more working together on this, because 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 is they call it in situ preservation, which means let it rot. Gold is not affected by saltwater or time. Silver is. You know. You've seen silver coins that you saw at our seminar, silver coins that have been in the water for 300 years don't look all that good anymore. The wood's rotting away, the ceramics get broken into smaller and smaller pieces and at a certain point it all becomes sand, except for the gold coins. You know, anything made of gold. As Mel said, gold shines forever. Nothing. It's as inert as anything gets. But eventually there won't be any. 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, who are immature 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. You know, we don't get to, we don't, 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, and one of my favorite poems that I've written was about a ballast rock and 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 and it turned out to be a nice round rock. Somebody picked it up one day and threw it at a rabbit, because that's how you kill the rabbit, that's how you got food. You threw rocks at it. The rock persisted and the next time somebody picked it up they were looking for stones to ballast the ship. So 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. Yeah, a lot of ballast rock gardens, beautiful description Beautiful description, beautiful description.
Speaker 1: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? Okay, you have the one on the post. Okay, and what's the name of it?
Speaker 2:search and salvage the poems of captain bill blagg.
Speaker 1:It's on amazon okay, all right, and I will make sure to put that in the show notes and so anybody who's interested can can look that up and go to Amazon to get that. I'm sure that's that's very insightful and interesting and any any other ways that people can connect with you that you're out there.
Speaker 2:We're big on Facebook.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Bill Black and Sebastian Florida, or Search and Salvage. Okay, we have a page for our Samson Restoration Project. I post pretty often, you know, if somebody wants to join in and follow along with some skin in the game, 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. If we find a thousand coins you're going to get 40, 50, you'll get you know. With 1% you get five points-ish. Okay, 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, um, and put your, your marriage in dangerous waters sometimes. My wife often says have you noticed how all your friends are divorced?
Speaker 1:well, everybody, I think, wants to be a part of treasure hunting. You know that, that, like I said, all your friends and divorce Well, everybody, I think, wants to be a part of treasure hunting. 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, moxieie 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 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. 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 and 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 ropings and said this will work and spent the next nine years rodeoing until my shoulder went through. 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 some bird dogs, you've already set up to go, did that until I got divorced, then went back to just riding and trading horses for a while, got to where I couldn't do that physically because I'd made too many judgmental errors. Is this horse ready to ride? Sure, wasn't all that great at riding. I guess I was pretty good at training.
Speaker 2:When I was 50 I decided I was going to change my life completely and did. Sometimes it works. I've been broke three or four times. I've got a little poem in the book about that and every time I've just you kind of crawl out of it. You look around and say, okay, 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'd like to do that. And that's kind of where I wanted to be.
Speaker 2:I've been blessed with being around the right kind of being able to find the right kind of people to let me do it and a wife well, actually two wives. My first wife wasn't. She was never averse to whatever it was I was doing. Didn't understand it. Well, of course my second wife present wife is awesome. Doesn't't understand it. Well, of course, my present life is awesome. Doesn't really understand it either. You don't find a lot of women in the treasure list. It's too much of a risk. Women just by their nature. Not that they're bad, probably smarter, because if you have two people in a relationship and both of them are big risk takers, you could end up sleeping on the beach. You're twice as liable to end up sleeping on the beach, so you balance each other out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you really do, and that's why men and women got to be this way. We're balancing that. Some people, people, a lot of people don't understand and I'm sure that you do that being married to the most perfect person in the world ain't that good every day, and sometimes it's months when you're just not real happy, but you kind of 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. Then you're back with that person that you that you mean so much to you.
Speaker 1:Right, but if you.
Speaker 2:If you just keep selling, you know, if you get a horse half broken, keep selling them, you're never going to get the one you want. So that's that's kind of what it looks like to me is just keep trying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and don't be afraid, 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.
Speaker 2:For so many, thank you and 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've, I enjoy it okay since I know we're. Since I know we're not going to be doing a video where I'm a lot happier, I'll get out of town.
Speaker 1:Well, listen. Thank you so so much. I really, really appreciate this. I'm gonna sign off with the listeners and then we can keep talking, but thanks everybody for listening. And look in the show notes and you can get more information about captain bill black and all his adventures.
Speaker 2: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 Follow or subscribe to the podcast and, while there, leave a review, and then maybe share this with a friend if you think they'd like it 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.