|
|
 |
|
| Feature |
Detectives of the Deep
Michelle Seaton
01/01/2006
|
Today, Mel Fisher Enterprises has 100 investors who
have each paid up to $72,000 for a single share of treasure. (Investors can also
purchase fractions of shares. In total, investors claim about 35 percent of the
treasure recovered in any year.) Since that first investor party, fuel and other
costs have doubled, and the rate of actual treasure recovery has slowed. While
the best a new investor can currently hope for is to break even, that could all
change if the family finds the ship’s forecastle, which might house the bulk of
the Atocha’s treasure. “There is still potential for a 100-to-1 payout,” Kim
Fisher enthuses. (See “Vicarious Investment”.)
 | | THE SALVAGE vessel J.B. Magruder serves as the base for excavation of the Nuestra Señora de Atocha. (Photograph courtesy Mel Fisher’s Treasures.) |
After Stemm’s first
success finding a Spanish galleon in 1989, he and his partner took their company
public, folded, founded a new company and went public again in 1995 as Marine
Odyssey Exploration, which currently has a market cap of roughly $180 million.
The stock trades publicly on the American Stock Exchange as OMR, and as one
would expect from a company that racks up huge expenses while hunting for
treasure, the stock is extremely volatile; it hit a low of $2.25 per share in
2005. Yet, on news that the company may have found the Sussex, the stock shot up
to $5.75 per share.
 |  | | Top: AFTER THE first coins were removed from the SS Republic site, a
virtual carpet of gold was revealed. Bottom: A locket with a photo
of Thyrza Nichols was carried by Col. William Nichols when the Republic sank. (Photography courtesy Odyssey Marine Exploration.) |
Shortly after the company went public for the
second time, Odyssey researchers found the remnants of the SS Republic, a
steamship lost in 1865 carrying $400,000 in gold and silver coins, a find with
an estimated worth in the millions of dollars. The treasure hunt is the subject
of at least two television documentaries and was featured in National Geographic
magazine. Marine Odyssey Exploration has already sold $25 million worth of coins
from the boat wreckage, however the company also spends millions annually in
operational costs.
According to Stemm, the company spends $25,000 a day on
everything from on-shore research to the scouring of promising sites and the
ongoing excavation of relics such as the Republic. To put together an operation
like this one, a treasure hunter would need to spend at least $5 million on a
ship capable of carrying the right equipment and crew, and then as much as
another $3 million on a remotely operated vehicle system that can work at great
depths to record high-definition video of shipwrecks, properly identify the ship
and then recover artifacts. Integrating technologies such as sidescan sonar,
magnets to detect iron and a GPS system with the research ship and remote
vehicle would cost still another $1 million. Stemm employs seven full-time
researchers who correlate the data collected from archives from throughout the
world in an effort to narrow the search area. It is a process that can take
years. He estimates that the company has, to date, spent $30 million on the
equipment and research.
 | | MORE THAN 200 different bottle types were recovered from the ship. (Photograph courtesy Odyssey Marine Exploration.) |
Stemm knows that groups of explorers are equipping themselves with boats loaded
with technology and researchers to compete with Marine Odyssey Exploration to
find the next Sussex. He feels that as competition increases, those outfits that
are fully funded and, like his company, publicly traded, will dominate the
search and recovery of lost treasure. “My goal is to make money for shareholders
and employees, to retire wealthy and have fun doing it.”
Michelle Seaton is a Massachusetts-based senior correspondent for Worth.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
