Beautiful 1715 Treasure Fleet find! Ft Pierce Florida area

July 2005 - FT. PIERCE, FL - "I’ll never complain about your going metal detecting again!" Jennifer had just finished jumping up and down between exclamations. "Oh My God!" Her husband, Gary Drayton, had been detecting the beach several hundred yards to the south and had placed in her hand a beautiful gold and emerald ring he had just recovered. It was a ring that had obviously had been carried aboard the 1715 Spanish galleon "Nieves" that sank 2-1/2 miles south of the Fort Pierce inlet. It was a narrow gold band with eight deep-green emeralds surrounding a center-mounted, larger green emerald. It was a magnificent ring that barely hinted at its submersion in the ocean for almost 290 years. But then … gold is forever.

The day was great for beach hunting, windless with a calm ocean. He always liked to get an early start in the morning, and that day he had a feeling it was "his" day. On recent visits to this beach he had begun to recover a few silver coins and silver plate parts, mixed in with an assortment of iron spikes. His wife Jennifer had said that morning, "Put your metal detector in the car, and I’ll sit on the beach with the kids while you detect." It was a family decision that had a good omen. Gary was using a Minelab "Excalibur" metal detector and got his "hit" in a pile of shells several yards up from the water’s edge. It was a different kind of hit, louder and with a different tone. He dug down about 18 inches, and when he first saw the artifact he believed it to be a champagne bottle top twist. As he picked it up and turned it over, his knees became weak. The gold was as bright and shiny as the day it was made, and the emeralds were unbelievably deep green. He was thunderstruck. He walked down to the water’s edge, then back up to the dune line. He was seized by the urgency to show the ring to his wife, and running in sand took his breath away.

And so it went, a family outing that produced a treasure fit for a king. The Drayton family will be spending many more trips to the beach, and if luck will have it there will be more jumping up and down as treasure is recovered.