the following morning, Ed spent the next two days comb- 

 ing carefully back and forth over the deep water adjacent 

 to the ballast site. To make sure that we did not miss a 

 clue, Bob Leckie patiently guided Sally and me in turn 

 over the same territory in the glass-bottomed boat, hop- 

 ing to glimpse some sign of wreckage which the mag- 

 netometer might miss. But there was not a trace of any- 

 thing. The whole bottom was as clean as if it had been 

 swept with a giant broom. The arrival of a "norther" on 

 the third day forced us to give up our search and head for 

 Nassau. 



We did not abandon our hopes of Cay Gorda with 

 that one attempt, however. That same summer, on our 

 way to Burrows cay with Jane and Barney, we stopped oJBF 

 there again. In the meantime we had come to the conclu- 

 sion that if coins had been washed up on the beach in such 

 numbers over the years, there must still be some in the 

 sandy bottom between the ballast pile and shore. 



Sure enough. After a morning of scrounging at the 

 edge of the rock pile, we managed to find three heavily 

 encrusted coins. Only one of them was in sufficiently good 

 condition to permit identification, and that was only after 

 Jane had patiently sanded away at the encrustration over 

 a period of several days. It proved to be a Spanish silver 

 coin of the seventeenth century, a crude cob with a shield 

 upon one side and a square cross with castle and lions in 

 alternate corners. We later ascertained that this coin co- 

 incided with the authenticated period of the silver bars 

 which had come from the same site. 



While we now felt that we had explored every pos- 

 sibility at Cay Gorda, there still remained one facet of 

 this interesting wreck to be followed. Since our first visit 

 we had heard tales of fishermen obtaining ballast for their 

 boats from this convenient spot, where the water was so 

 shallow that the bars could be hooked up from the bot- 



136 Sea Diver 



