Diving for shipwrecked loot
A family business hunts for silver and gold off the coast of Florida.
KEY WEST (Fortune Small Business) -- The air tastes warm and salty, and the midmorning sun glints off the turquoise waves that sway the Dare.
Thirty feet below the deck of this 83-foot salvage ship, a half-dozen scuba divers are scouring the remains of a 400-year-old Spanish galleon, which is laden with emeralds, pearls, silver and gold. I lean over the side and watch a diver emerge from the depths, his arm held high. He clutches what looks like a spiky black rock. He spits out his regulator and shouts, "Yeah!" The divers on the boat break into cheers. They instantly recognize the object he's holding as a mass of oxidized silver coins -- perhaps 50 all together -- that could be worth as much as $500,000.
Aboard the Dare, divers pass around the rock. One of them lifts the black mound to his nose and sniffs deeply. "Smell it," he tells me. "It smells like silver." The scent takes me back to my grandmother's kitchen and the aroma of her polished flatware.
These divers have been on this ship for more than a week, making four or five daily searches on an expedition that, until today, has been largely a bust. "This makes our whole trip worthwhile," says Josh Fisher-Abt, a 28-year-old diver whose grandfather created Mel Fisher's Treasures, the small outfit that organized this trip.
The family-owned business runs treasure exploration and recovery operations year-round in the warm tropical waters surrounding Key West. Over the past two decades, Mel Fisher's Treasures has grossed as much as $14 million in one year from the booty it has found. Seven of the past 10 years have not been profitable, however, so to ensure cash flow the firm raises $2.8 million a year from individual investors, who currently number about 200. Buying shares worth $10,000 to $80,000, the investors -- divers, small business owners, history buffs -- become part owners of Fisher's treasure-hunting operation and get paid in silver coins, gold chains, pearls and other spoils.
"This is about history," says Dave Pfent, 42, a lean, tan dentist who runs his own practice in Fort Myers, Fla. Pfent has been an investor in the company for two years at the $10,000 level and has made a dozen dives to various shipwreck sites that the company is excavating. But Pfent admits to other incentives too: He and his wife, Elizabeth, also a dentist, once had the thrill of finding emeralds (although they weren't worth much).
"Right now, I think it's better to invest in something you can hold, not something on paper," he says.
Mel Fisher, who died in 1998, was an early scuba aficionado and dive instructor. In 1953 he opened the first dive shop in the United States, in Redondo Beach, Calif. Fisher spent 16 years hunting for the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish galleon that disappeared in 1622 en route from Cuba to Spain. He moved to Key West to coordinate the search and hired researchers to comb through marine archives in Seville.
Although Fisher found the first artifact from the ship in 1971, it wasn't until July 20, 1985, that his divers finally found the main wreck 35 miles offshore, along with its sister ship, the Santa Margarita. Both vessels were loaded with treasure, about half of which the Fishers have since recovered.
"He went bankrupt five times before he hit it," says Sean Fisher, 31, another of Mel's grandsons, who is currently taking over business operations from his dad, Kim, 53.
After the initial find, the Fishers spent years mired in a legal battle with the state of Florida, which also laid claim to the wreck. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the Fishers won a 5-to-2 decision in 1982. On the day of the high court's ruling, a state inspector was on the family's salvage ship, to keep track of any treasure in case Florida won. The Fishers were all too happy to see the inspector go.
"They radioed the news that a boat was coming to pick him up," says Kim, who, like most of the company's employees, wears a casual short-sleeve shirt, shorts, flip-flops and a weighty silver Spanish coin around his neck. "We waited until we could see the boat on the horizon, and then we tossed him overboard."
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