In 1950 Mel moved with his parents to Torrance, California. They operated a chicken ranch there. Mel continued to pursue his interest in diving while he helped with the ranch and also studied animal husbandry at El Camino College.
July 20, 1985 was "the day" at last when Mel Fisher, the world's greatest treasure hunter, found his dream of dreams, the priceless treasure cargo of the fabled lost Spanish galleon Atocha
At 1:05 p.m. that amazing day, Mel Fisher learned from his son Kane that his greatest dream had been realized. The marine radio crackled to life in the Key West, Florida office of Mel Fisher and his Treasure Salvors, Inc. "WZG 9605. Unit 1, this is Unit 11." From aboard the vessel Dauntless of which he was captain, Kane told his beaming father: "Put away the charts. We've got the 'Mother Lode'!"
The dream that had consumed Mel Fisher for more than 16 years now came true before the eyes of the world. He had found the rainbow's end, stacks of silver bars, chests of treasure coins, gold, jewels, and unique artifacts of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha Mel Fisher found what adventurous souls through centuries had only dreamed of finding!
Mel Fisher's dreams of treasure began in childhood with the reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, and about pirates of the "Spanish Main." He also read about exploits of deep sea divers in their bulky"hard hat" suits who were just beginning exploration of the sub-sea world. There were no oceans to conquer in Hobart and Glen Park, Indiana. But at age eleven, Mel Fisher made his own first "hard hat" diving outfit to use in a mud-bottomed lagoon.
Mel learned carpentry skills from his father, Earl Fisher, and his musical talents seemed to come from his mother's side of the family. Grace Sprencel Fisher and her sisters were gifted in music and dance. Mel Fisher formed his first dance band while at tending Lew Wallace High School at Glen Park, Indiana. He attended Purdue University, where he studied engineering and led his own 21 piece band. With the outbreak of World War 11, Mel went into the U.S. Army. He was trained and served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Before being shipped over seas to Europe with the Army Engineers, he studied at the University of Alabama where he was later awarded an honorary doctorate.
After the war, Mel restlessly moved to Chicago and Denver, then to Florida where he again pursued his primary interest in diving. Mel was also a developer of his own spear guns, cameras and other equipment needed for his underwater adventures and exploration. Near Tampa, Mel saw his first real treasure from a sunken ship.
From Florida, Mel Fisher drove to California to purchase one of the first scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) units perfected by Jacques Cousteau.
In 1950 Mel moved with his parents to Torrance, California. They operated a chicken ranch there. Mel continued to pursue his interest in diving while he helped with the ranch and also studied animal husbandry at El Camino College.
Mel Fisher opened his first dive shop in a small feed shed on the family chicken ranch. He had a small compressor and sold "breathing" air as well as scuba equipment and parts.
A gorgeous, red-haired girl called Dolores Horton lighted Mel Fisher's life after her mother and uncle bought the chicken ranch. Dolores became his wife and partner in all his endeavors.
She was from Montana and a stranger to the ocean, but quickly became a mermaid called "Deo." On their honeymoon, the handsome young couple went diving on shipwrecks in Florida and the Florida Keys. They planned to open a store devoted exclusively to diving. To raise the money, they dived commercially for spiny lobster in the frigid California waters. This was grueling but lucrative work and they built their own business one wall at a time. Finally they opened Mel's Aqua Shop in Redondo Beach, California. This was the first "dive shop" in the world.
Mel and Dolores Fisher were hugely successful in this pioneering business, training more than 65,000 novices in the science of scuba diving. Years later Mel received a prestigious award for his contributions to education in diving. An undersea pioneer, Mel made early underwater films and movies, for training, advertising and entertainment purposes. When television was still young, Mel Fisher aired his own underwater adventures on weekly "T~' shows that reached millions of viewers on the nation's West Coast. A great photogenic help with Mel's underwater commercials for swimwear manufacturers, Dolores personally set a world underwater endurance record that continues through the years to stand as a woman's underwater endurance record of more than 55 hours and 37 minutes (55:37:9-6)
Mel and Deo were the unofficial "king and queen" of the underwater world.
Mel nearly began a second California "gold rush" by introducing the adventurous to hunting for gold in mountain streams and rivers. Mountain goldhunting was great fun. But in the back of Mel's mind, always, was an undersea vision of golden doubloons and Spanish shipwrecks. He even named his first dive boat the Golden Doubloon.
Four children were born to Mel and Dolores Fisher, sons Dirk, Kim and Kane, and daughter Taffi. A Fisher enterprise has always been a "family' activity. At one time, relatives of both Mel and Deo helped cut out and assemble early "wet suits" for diving. This was yet another of Mel Fisher's pioneering underwater activities. Mel personally continued to develop various types of spear guns, including gas guns, underwater cameras, and other underwater equipment.
In company with other multi-talented divers, the Fishers explored the California coast for shipwrecks, and ultimately completed several exciting treasure hunting expeditions into the Caribbean.
Discoveries from these adventures were limited. But each one gave unique training to Mel, Deo, and others of the team that ultimately found the Atocha
Only the future will identify the grandest finds by Mel and his crews. But the world knows best of his most challenging single treasure hunt: the quest for the Atocha "Mother Lode."
In 1963, returning from the Caribbean through Florida, Mel had a water shed meeting with a treasure hunter named Kip Wagner. Wagner and his group of "weekend warriors" had been attempting to salvage remains of wrecks of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet lost off Florida's East Coast. Illequipped, with his crew unable to devote fulltime to the project, Wagner invited Mel to join him on a 50-50 basis.
Mel and Deo returned to California. The mail and bills delivered during their expedition made quite a pile. Mel asked Deo if she'd rather deal with the pile of paper or go treasure hunting. She opted for treasure hunting and their greatest odyssey began.
Most of the group moved east in a highway caravan. They found that diving on the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks was as difficult as any diving they had ever done. These doomed ships had been wrecked very close to shore where the water was murkiest. Visibility was often zero.
The greatest help in actual location of the 1715 shipwrecks was a development by Fay Feild, electronics wizard and enduring member of the team. Feild's sensitive instrument called a proton magnetometer successfully found portions of ships of the hurricane doomed great fleet.
But the treasure hunters inability to see underwater was crippling their shallow-water efforts. Finally, engineer Mel Fisher, who had also learned practical skills such as welding, developed a device that, because of its shape, they called a ''mailbox." Lowered from the vessel stern over the propellers, the mailbox" would send a layer of clear water near the surface downward to the bottom so the divers could see.
In that spring of 1964, testing of the "mailbox" did more than bring clear water to the bottom. Just as their year was nearly ended, the " mailbox" parted the sands and revealed 1,033 gold coins. Mel Fisher exclaimed "Once you have seen the ocean bottom paved with gold, you'll never forget it!"
The Fisher team of Treasure Salvors, Inc., with the Wagner team of the Real Eight Company, originally recovered more than $20 million in treasure from the 1715 Fleet shipwrecks during the 1960s. Discoveries of much more treasure from 1715 Fleet wrecks have continued through decades.
Fisher's "golden crews" later found treasures worth more than $400 million on the sister "golden galleons," Atocha and Santa Margarita, lost in the same treasure fleet in 1622.
Over the years many millions of dollars in treasure have been recovered from both the wrecks of the 1715 Plate Fleet, and the 1622 combined Spanish treasure fleet lost off the Florida Keys.
Work of the Fisher teams will continue through the turn of the century. Thousands of Spanish gold coins many never seen before; tons of silver coins, many of them rare and in amazing condition; period and earlier amazing Spanish objects and wares, rare intact K'ang Hsi porcelains, exquisite jewelry set with precious stones, gold chains, discs, and other objects of antiquity! These and more discoveries by Mel Fisher and his "crews" reflect the richest treasure finds since the opening of King Tut's tomb in the 1930s.
The first shift of Mel's treasure hunting focus from the 1715 shipwreck sites to the Florida Keys and the elusive Atocha came in the middle 1960s because of the weather. Diving could not be done year-round on the 1715 wrecks. Because of storms it was impossible to dive and salvage during the winter months. In those times, Mel began to search for shipwrecks in the calmer waters of the tropical Keys. His search for other wrecks, several from a lost 1733 Spanish fleet, was modestly successful, but these activities really resembled a "vacation" from the more serious work of the summer salvage season on 1715 Fleet wrecks.
As if guided by destiny, Mel renewed his interest in a sunken Spanish galleon that was virtually unsalvaged and believed at the time to have been lost in 1622 off the Matecumbe Keys of Florida. Further investigation showed that this galleon was immensely rich, possibly the richest ever lost off the coast of Florida.
The full name of the vessel was Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a royal guard galleon the loss of which had hastened the decline of the Spanish Empire. Mel Fisher had found a new goal worthy of his greatest effort.
The quest began for the Atocha and her priceless "Mother Lode" of treasure that had been so desperately needed by the Spanish crown in the early 1600s.
More than 350 years later, Mel Fisher's search efforts crossed a bridge of time from the New World to the Old World, a bridge of geography linking the Archive of the Indies at Seville Spain, and the trackless, always-changing sea floor south and westward of the Florida Keys.
The greatest single Spanish galleon hunt took years, cost lives, and challenged all who served as members of Mel Fisher's Atocha Golden Crew."
Some who had shared the first magic of the 1715 Fleet treasure salvage continued that rich work under Mel s leadership through the quest for the 1622 galleons, and even on to the present times. Others signed onto Mel's "crew" roster with the Atocha hunt and still search for treasure with the greatest hunter among them.
Mel Fisher made a commitment of his greatest personal effort to find the Atocha, believing every day for many years that the elusive lady was ready at last to reveal her lavish secrets. Lesser men would have failed.
In 1980, Mel Fisher topped his previous glories as a treasure hunter to discover the millions of dollars worth of gold and other riches of the Santa Margarita.
Mel was elated, but he chose to press on in the hunt for Nuestra Senora de Atocha. Because he did, five years later, and forever, the lives of Mel and Dolores Fisher, their family and all their crews were lifted onto the world's stage as people who truly contributed to the precious and priceless historical and cultural heritage of the world.
Finding treasures and artifacts such as the world has never seen is only the beginning. They must be conserved, studied, restored, recorded and, to share them with the world, exhibited.
With first finds of treasures from the 1715 Fleet in the 1960s, one of Mel's projects was to operate a small treasure museum. Mel hunted in Europe and purchased an old ship in the 1970s brought it across the Atlantic Ocean and converted it into a replica galleon that was a floating museum and headquarters for his operations.
In the 1980s, with part of his share of treasure from the Atocha, Mel bought a huge former Key West Naval Station building to permanently house the non-profit Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society Museum, with research center and conservation laboratories.
As the 1990s opened, the Mel Fisher Center, Inc., was opened in Sebastian, Florida, for conservation and exhibition of many of the new discoveries from wrecks of the 1715 Fleet. Educational and research activities were planned by Mel for Key West and Sebastian, Florida, as traveling treasure exhibits were also being planned.
For Mel Fisher, the glory is in the quest, wherever in the world it may take him. Beyond the 1622 and 1715 treasure galleons, Mel has conducted explorations in the Caribbean, off South America, and elsewhere in the world.
Working with associate Pat Clyne and others, he has been conducting research and development on new treasure hunting techniques. They assembled a high-resolution, video remote sensing package to help pinpoint and isolate possible underwater search targets from the air.
"We're constantly doing state-of-the-art work to develop long-range density imagery systems, to discriminate gold, " says Mel. "We're way out ahead; we really are. We have always been on the leading edge of undersea technology and detection systems."
Mel, his crew, and more than 50 subcontract treasure hunters are continuing their recoveries from the 1715 Fleet shipwreck sites.
While daughter Taffi works ashore on the new Mel Fisher Center at Sebastian sons Kim and Kane operate search vessels and use the latest technology on 1715 wrecks.
The arrival of the 1990s saw Mel Fisher repeating a special kind of history with magnificent new discoveries from the 1715 Fleet. Eight magnificent gold rings in one day. A splendid gold pendant with pearls. An inscribed ship's bell. A new wreck of the same fleet. Silver pieces of eight" and gold doubloons" are not dreams, but real. For those who dream and persist like Mel Fisher, "Today" is always "The Day."
Thousands of people, students, scholars and interested persons come from all over the world to see the educational cultural and historical treasures that have been raised from oblivion by Mel Fisher and his crews.
In addition to the museums, original and replica treasure objects can be purchased at showrooms in Key West and Sebastian, Florida.
Whoever comes to see Mel Fisher also comes, he knows, to share the glory of discovery.
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