HOT NEWS !

By Bonnie K. Goodman - Examiner

By accident, two treasure hunters have found the holy grail of all shipwrecks Le Griffon that vanished on its maiden voyage in 1679, and its location not discovered until now.

In 2011, Kevin Dykstra and Frederick Monroe looking for the mythical $2 million in Confederate gold lost as well in Lake Michigan, instead they hit on another treasure one with less monetary value.

The treasure seekers kept their find a secret for nearly four years until they could confirm it was the famed lost ship.

They waited all the way until December 2014 to take their incredible finding public.

The news was met with skepticism from historians and archeologists. Still Dykstra and Monroe are convinced they solved one of North American history's great mysteries.

The French explorer Robert LaSalle embarked on the maiden voyage on Sept. 18, 1679 in his new 40-foot ship with a crew of six travelling from today's Green Bay, Wisconsin to Niagara.

The New France explorer's ship was full of furs, and it was during their return trip that they hit troubled waters.

The ship vanished after a storm somewhere in the waters of Northern Lake Michigan. Since the ship was never found nor any of the crew conspiracies sprung up, among the most popular theories, natives captured the vessel, mutiny by the ship's crew and the most probable reason, a storm.

An account of the voyage explained why it was impossible to find in over 330 years "with a light and very favorable wind from the West. It has not been possible to ascertain since what course they steered."

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By Sarah Moses - Syracuse

A team of shipwreck enthusiasts who have made several discoveries of sunken schooners, steamers and even an airplane in Lake Ontario have discovered two canal boats on the bottom of the lake.

"They aren't suppose to be there," said Jim Kennard, a member of the team. "What is a canal boat doing out there ?"

Kennard said the two canal boats, which may date back to the mid-1800s, could have been used on the Oswego Canal, but were not built to be used on Lake Ontario.

Kennard, Roger Pawlowski, and Roland Stevens, all from the Rochester area, have announced several of their discoveries over the past few years but they typically wait to make a discovery public until they know exactly what they've found.

"We like to put a name to these boats first, but we haven't been able to identify them," Kennard said.

The boats were discovered off of the shores of Oswego. Locating canal boats in Lake Ontario is an unusual event as these craft were not built for transportation on the open lake and therefore Kennard wanted to make sure that these were canal boats.

Divers and an underwater remote operated vehicle were able to confirm that they were canal boats this summer.

By Rossella Lorenzi - News Discovery

Gleaming cast metal called orichalcum, which was said by Ancient Greeks to be found in Atlantis, have been recovered from a shipwreck that sunk 2,600 years ago off the coast of Sicily.

The lumps of metal were arriving to Gela in southern Sicily, possibly coming from Greece or Asia Minor. The ship that was carrying them was likely caught in a storm and sunk just when it was about to enter the port.

He noted that the 39 ingots found on the sandy sea floor represent a unique finding.

"Nothing similar has ever been found," Tusa said. "We knew orichalcum from ancient texts and a few ornamental objects."

Indeed orichalcum has long been considered a mysterious metal, its composition and origin widely debated.

According to the ancient Greeks, it was invented by Cadmus, a Greek-Phoenician mythological character. The fourth century B.C. Greek philosopher Plato made orichalcum a legendary metal when he mentioned it in the Critias dialogue.

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From CCTV

Great progress has been made in the recovery of thousands of relics from a famous Song dynasty ship that sank in the South China Sea about 800 years ago.

After a year of hard work, most of the silt covering thousands of artifacts inside the ship has been cleaned up.

It is estimated that there are 60,000 to 80,000 relics inside the ship, including gold artifacts, brass and iron wares, and many porcelain items. Now that most of the mud and silt has been cleaned up, one can see densely arranged relics.

The discovery of the sunken ship in 1987 was said to shed new light on the marine silk road, through which China's silk, porcelain and other artifacts were transported to Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and all the way to Africa and Europe.

But the wreckage was not lifted from the ocean floor until December 2007.

It was then placed in a pool-type container called the "Crystal Palace," which became part of a Marine Silk Road Museum built on the site, in Yangjiang city, Guangdong province.

At the museum, visitors can witness the salvage process and see the thousand artifacts already extracted from the ship. Made of gold and porcelain by Song artisans, they were meant to be sold overseas. Some of the more recently restored relics have influences from mid-western Asia.

Nanhai One is the oldest and largest sunken ship ever found in China. The remaining ship body is 21.8 meters long and has 13 large cabins for goods storage. 

Removing all the relics from the wreckage is expected to take another two to three years.

From Seeking Alpha

Most interesting is that OMEX was found to have violated the MMO's rules on 4 separate items. As this was a first offense in the UK and the UK is unable (for jurisdictional reasons) to use
the non-UK evidence such as the Mercedes/Black Swan judgment against OMEX, the sanction was to issue an official warning letter rather than to prosecute. In addition according to the UK
compliance and enforcement strategy this light sanction was used to save the government costs of dealing with a further court case.

Importantly - this is now officially in OMEX's record and will make any future violations MUCH riskier. Given the bull case for the HMS Victory is from selling artifacts that belonged to
passengers or other "trade goods" (a term not officially legally defined) which appears to be in violation of the UNESCO Annex, this new official warning letter puts a much higher level of
scrutiny on OMEX if they tread around the edges of the rules. In fact, a second FOIA indicates that OMEX will likely require an independent government archeologist to monitor their conduct
at the site.

According to searches on the MMO website, we still cannot find a license application submitted yet by OMEX or the MHF for the HMS Victory work. We understand there is a 3 month public
comment period once a license is applied for so the clock is still ticking on that.

Full article...

Original lette from Marine Management Organisation

By Mark Prigg - Mail Online

It was lost over 100 years ago in what many consider the worst maritime disaster in San Francisco history.

On Feb. 22, 1901, in a dense morning fog, the SS City of Rio de Janeiro struck jagged rocks near the Golden Gate Bridge and sank almost immediately, killing 128 of the 210 passengers and crew aboard the ship.

The ship was never found - until now.

The NOAA and partners today released three-dimensional sonar maps and images of the immigrant steamship.

We are undertaking this exploration of the San Francisco Bay in part to learn more about its maritime heritage as well as to test recent advances in technology that will allow us to better protect and understand the rich stories found beneath the Bay's waters,' said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

The images also revealed that the ship did not, as rumoured, contain treasure.

The City of Rio de Janeiro was rumored to be full of silver treasure, but Delgado said accounts of a shipment of 'Chinese silver' were actually bars of tin.

Today the wreck is broken and filled with mud, and it is a sealed grave in fast, dangerous waters in the main shipping lanes,' he said.

Full article...

By Mark Prigg - Mail Online

Divers have uncovered a preserved 'ghost ship' in 2,000 feet of water nearly 20 miles off the coast of Oahu in Hawaii.

Sitting upright, its solitary mast still standing and the ship's wheel still in place, the hulk of the former cable ship Dickenson, later the USS Kailua, was found on the seabed.

Experts were stunned to find the ship was surprisingly intact for a vessel that was sunk with a torpedo.

Researchers from the University of Hawai'i (UH) and NOAA's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries today revealed the ship was found by a robotic submersible. 

It is always a thrill when you are closing in on a large sonar target with the Pisces submersible and you don't know what big piece of history is going to come looming out of the dark, said Terry Kerby, the submersible pilot.

One of our first views of the USS Kailua was the classic helms wheel on the fantail. 


Full article

By Henry Brean - Review Journal

As early as this summer, divers could once again have the chance to explore the wreckage of a World War II-era bomber at the bottom of Lake Mead.

The National Park Service announced Thursday it will accept bids from dive companies interested in taking people on guided tours of the 66-year-old B-29 wreckage, which has been closed to divers since 2009.

Record low water levels have brought the sunken Superfortress within reach of recreational divers for the first time ever, and the aircraft will only get easier to reach as the reservoir continues to shrink.

According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the B-29 was one of the last built and was delivered to the U.S. Army eleven days after the end of World War II.

Stripped of armaments, it became a post-war reconnaissance plane used in an upper atmospheric research program based at Muroc Army Airfield in California.

“Part of this research was focused on the development of a device that used the sun as a point of reference to guide missiles as they arched from the United States towards the Soviet Union,” NOAA said.

On July 21, 1948, the plane was being flown on a mission to test a secret missile guidance system. While descending over the smooth-as-glass lake, the pilot lost depth perception and flew the bomber into the water at 230 mph. It skipped once, settled onto the surface and sank.

All five crew members survived, but the bomber was lost until August 2001, when a team of local divers discovered it sitting upright and mostly intact on the lake bottom.

In 2003, archaeologists from the Park Service’s Submerged Resources Center mapped and documented the wreck. Five years later, the Park Service awarded one-year permits to two companies — one from Lake Havasu City, Ariz., and the other from Ventura, Calif. — for guided technical dives at the site, then at a depth of roughly 160 feet.

Technical dives exceed 130 feet in depth and require more training and equipment than more common and less hazardous recreational scuba dives at lesser depths.

Christie Vanover, spokeswoman for the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said those first two permits were not renewed in 2009 because the companies struggled to turn a profit under the restrictions placed on them.

The Park Service is now offering what it hopes is a more enticing deal: a two-year, commercial-use permit allowing up to 100 divers a year at the B-29 wreck and unlimited scuba instruction and charter dives to other “submerged resources” in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

Vanover said the Park Service hopes to issue two of the permits by April and see visits to the B-29 resume by summer.

“We have had people express an interest over the years. We think this is the best option, and it provides a business opportunity,” she said. “We hope to see multiple applications.”

The wreckage now rests under roughly 110 feet of water in the Overton Arm, at the northern end of the lake. The Park Service won’t give the precise location or depth because the site is considered a “protected resource.”

Full article...