Wreckhunting

Not long after we got settled in down here, we started exploring the reefs for, well, lets just say we just like to be exploring. A friend on Pine Cay who is now in his 80s told us tales of neat stuff to be found. He has ballast stones at his house, bottle fragments, cannon balls. We started looking around. Hour after hour swimming along with mask and snorkel looking in likely places.

We found this coral head with a "scar" on one side of it.

About twenty feet away we found our first ballast pile. The stones are from Europe and not hard to spot once you know what to look for. All the native rock here is marine coral limestone. A hunk of blue slate from the Azores stands out.



We keep expanding our search around this site (more on this later). We have found clay bricks, firebricks and bottle fragments from the 1700s. We started finding pieces of encrusted iron that we have not managed to open up without breaking.

We now have a couple dozen of these hand-blown bottle pieces.

It's hard to see here, but this is a piece of metal encrusted to a brick. It looks like a hinge to me. It was found where the other bricks are located. The metal is very fragile, and in some cases is only the coral that once covered the metal before it oxidized away.   Pieces of old shipwrecks in the ocean don't really look anything like the shipwrecks you see on Disney, do they.