Re: Nuestra Señora de Atocha Coordinates?
The maps.live.com (Virtual Earth by Microsoft) and Google are also joined by Yahoo and NASA with meter accurate photogrammetry... well not the NASA stuff... its very small scale compared to the others which are shot from airplanes instead of satellites. Even Ask.com had hosted aerials for a while. Goto
http://signumops.com/wreckmash.htm and you will see a list of some wrecksites which you can pick to observe in the Flash Earth mashup built by Paul Neave. If you pick the Cabin Wreck, Flash Earth will open using the Google Maps aerial and the centerpoint will fall on top of the Gold Hound boat directly in front of the original cabin site. To the south you can see the Lobster Man and to the N.E. you can see the C-25 boat. All three of us were digging on the Cabin Wreck at the time. You can also switch photo servers here using Yahoo or Microsoft and get different photography of differing quality. All told, the Flash Earth utility is extremely useful while shipwreck hunting nearshore.
As for the comments regarding Atocha locations specifically, they are public records generally, otherwise, how would the lease holder expect to protect their boundaries (?) Enforcement authorities can not act without specifics. That is, WHEN they choose to act. You can bet that the Fisher's have never received any official aid or assistance from either the Feds or Florida when it came to claim-jumpers at the Atocha, and probably little or none with regards to the leases they hold along the Spacecoast and Treasurecoast area.
Also, consider that, today, using WAAS GPS or DGPS, one only needs to pass within a quarter mile of an anchored vessel and use a laser pinger to determine a distance from your own GPS fix. That coupled with a bearing from a hand bearing compass will provide everything necessary to plot another vessel's position with great accuracy... accuracy great enough to permit you to setup your own vessel at the earliest opportunity at that same exact location. We are not talking about expensive equipment here, and the same thing can be done from shore in many instances. This position fixing is, by the way, exactly what the Florida State Archaeologists are supposed to be doing, but, I have not seen any of them visiting any of the Fisher leases over the last 6 years. At any rate, if they have been gathering this information with any regularity, I believe that it would be public information under Chapter 119. No matter, you can bet they have not exhausted a penny in such an effort.
I've read with some interest the remarks dealing with Cape locales I discussed in "The Rainbow Chasers" book I did with Tommy Gore and I would like to tell all my readers that I could give you the exact locations, but, you can never dig there because others have tried and were quashed by the Corp of Engineers, the Dept. of Natural Resources and the National Park Service. Randy Lathrop comes to mind instantly. About the only way you will ever find any of this stuff is by riding into these locations on horseback during a raging storm and then, you will have to be looking with your bare eyeballs, because you can't have a metal detector inside the park boundaries. For that matter, most of these locations are completely off limits to anybody anyway unless you have a hiking permit. If you are wealthy, you can enjoy looking at these places from your own airplane, or vis a vis Flash Earth. Good Luck! If I thought there was enough interest, I would compile another small book giving up some of the rumored sites along with the known federally registered sites inside of the Cape property. That's probably worth doing, because, after they bury me, who else would go to the trouble ?
Incidentally, while I am thinking about it, Ray Osbourne is publishing a new volume this month about the history of the Cape Canaveal area and I think its one of the "Images of America" series by Arcadia Press. I sent him some treasure related notes which he may include (I have not seen the book yet).
