Lynn and I are headed over for a little 5-day stay at the beach just SE of here (Hutchinson Island). We've been a few times and always enjoyed it, so why not? I have a buddy who's going to be visiting next summer and will be staying in the area we'll be. He asked me a while back about the diving opportunities in the area and I told him I'm not that familiar with specific areas, but I know there are tons of sunken ships off the coast (the hurricanes played hell with the Spaniards back in the day). It was just a short conversation and it was pretty much dropped from that point on. This morning, I remembered our conversation and just for grins, thought I'd try to find a map of old sunken Spanish ships (many laden with gold headed back to Spain).

WOW! I was born and raised here and know the whole east coast, as well as the Gulf Coast is lined with old shipwrecks, but dang! Here's just a tiny area of the coastal area where we'll be staying this weekend (Thur-Mon). All old Spanish ship wrecks. (I wonder what a map of the whole state would look like?) Interesting.

Where you see the line of ships is actually the barrier islands (where we'll be staying). West of that is the inland waterway then the coast of the mainland of Florida. (again, this is just a very small slice of the coast) I guess I can tell my buddy he could spend the rest of his life diving old wrecks down here and never live long enough to see them all! (We'll be staying just across the inland waterway from Stuart.)


treasurecoastmap.jpg