When we speak, superyacht owner Carl Allen is riding high off the back of an exciting week. He was at a wedding reception in Fort Worth, Texas, when Dan Porter, the project manager of his exploration company, flashed up on his phone screen. “I always get excited when I see Dan’s number come up,” he says. Allen ran somewhere quiet to hear the news.
Diving off his superyacht, his exploration team had discovered two cannon carriages about 12 metres under water, picked up first by magnetometer, then with a diver's hand metal detector. The cannons’ wood had deteriorated but their metal remained. Crucially, the cannons were only about 30 metres from each other.
“That means that we’re possibly near the centre of the ship,” says Allen. It means that he and his team might be near the “main pile” of the shipwreck they’ve been diving for many years now - or, what you might call “the mother lode”.
Perhaps the cannons weren't as exciting as the 60-carat emerald Allen once unearthed (“I thought it was a piece of a Heineken bottle!”), or a brooch they found with a 20-carat cabochon emerald in the middle, with two knights of Santiago crosses on either side of it, all gold. But they mark a significant development in Allen’s story - not least for someone who says he’s dreamed about finding treasure his whole life.
Allen’s story is one that many a yacht owner can relate to. Aged 50, he decided it was finally time to sell the company he’d built up from scratch and, after taking call after call in a New York hotel room with his wife Gigi, the deal was finally done. In May 2016, the business manufacturing rubbish is no normal boat.
