SS Gairsoppa

[Salvor6]

Odyssey Marine has entered into an agreement with the British MoD to find and salvage the wreck of the SS Gairsoppa. The ship was carrying over $100 mil worth of silver ingots when it was torpedoed off the Cornish coast.

 

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[allen_idaho]

Not really. When the Gairsoppa was sunk by German sub U-101 in Feb. 1941, she had onboard around $600,000 in silver, 2600 tons of Iron, 1700 tons of Tea, and 2400 tons of misc. cargo.

Back in 1941, the value of silver per ounce averaged at about $0.35. Given today's silver value of about $16.60 per ounce, the Gaisoppa has roughly $28,500,000 in silver onboard. Still not a bad haul if you consider that they will probably sink around $5-10 million into the recovery.

 

[jeff k]

The following may be more accurate.

"Gairsoppa was carrying just over 3 million fine ozs of silver in 2817 bars that weighed roughly 1,100 ozs/bar. Some bars were refined but most were not."

Update: She may have been carrying close to 7 million ounces of silver according to a Lloyds document. It says under cargo, "2600 tons pig iron, 1765 tons tea & 2369 tons general, and £600,000 worth of silver ingots."

£600,000 = $2,400,000 in 1941. 1941 silver spot was 35 cents per oz. If I did the math right, then there was 6,857,143 ounces of silver on the Gairsoppa.

 

[Trond]

Very interesting news. Thanks for posting.

 

[PDJ]

So it looks like they are about to begin -- the Russian trawler is in Portland. And looking at this thread -- Silver has sure gone up quite a bit since. $100,000,000+ according to the estimates of 3 million ounces of silver........hmmmmmm
But hey you never know -- maybe the coordinates were bad or there really was no silver. I guess we'll find out soon.