Shares for shipwreck recovery specialist firm Deep Blue Marine (Pink Sheets: DPBM) rose just over 12 percent today in response to the news that the company has located several ceramic bowls, possibly of oriental design, at a deep water site in the Florida Keys.”We found them last week,” Wilf Blum, president and CEO of Deep Blue Marine said in an interview. “These are porcelain bowls – they look like Ming dynasty porcelain – and there are shards and some intact bowls in the area. Now these [examples of] porcelain aren’t very common in the Keys, but aren’t totally unknown of in the Keys.”
At this time, Blum’s company doesn’t know what type of ship they’ve found, only that there’s a mix of potteries and artifacts at the site that could span a period of several decades.
“It’s not all Chinese porcelain, and it’s not all Spanish,” Blum told Market News First. “We’re doing research right now to see what privateers had sunk in this area.”
“We have no idea of the identity of this boat yet,” Blum added.
Deep Blue Marine is just one of many new companies looking to make a name for itself in the professional salvage industry. As such, they specialize in the commercial salvage of historic shipwrecks using some of the world’s best researchers, state-of-the-art technology, and an extensively experienced and expert crew. Equally interested in historical preservation as in treasure-hunting, the crew at Deep Blue Marine faithfully videotapes all their work, and ensures that all recovery efforts fall well within the environmental and archeological interests of the industry.
Although Deep Blue Marine discovered the wreck, they’re still waiting for permission for recovery.
“We do not have permission to pull [the wreck] up,” Blum said. “[But] we will have permission to pull them up next week. This is a typical debris field in the wreck. The beauty of the thing is that they’re in 200 feet of water so there’s no coral and there’s very little overburden — we just have to dust [the artifacts] off.
“These things are incredible,” Blum added.