Always look down

The great news for today is, there is buried treasure everywhere!

The not-so-great news is, we don't know where to look for it!

Sometimes, though, nature does the work for us. 

A guy named Mark O' Donoghue was walking along Crescent Beach in northern Florida and guess what he found? Not some discarded chicken bones or a Dr Pepper bottle or a broken kiddie toy. No, O'Donoghue found the remains of a shipwreck from the 1800s!

Florida has had far too many storms this year, but Tropical Storm Eta smacked the St Augustine area a couple of weeks ago, and the St. Augustine Lighthouse Archaeological Maritime Program says that once the storm moved north, the erosion it left behind left pieces of a shipwreck peeking out from the sand.

"I just saw some timbers that were uncovered by erosion on the sand on the beach," O'Donoghue told WJAX-TV.

Returning the next day, he found even more timbers in the sand, so he reported all this to the Archaeological Maritime Program.

Chuck Meide is in charge of that group, and he said that initial indications are that all this could be the wreckage of the Caroline Eddy, a U.S. merchant ship that went down in the 1800s.

What O'Donoghue found.

"Everything we've seen on it so far fits that hypothesis: wooden planking, wood timbers, iron fasteners," Meide told the news. "They look quite similar to other ships from the 1800s that we have seen."

But more verification will be required, just to make sure.

As background, the National Park Service says, "In late August 1880, the Caroline Eddy left Fernandina bound for New York with a cargo of lumber. She sailed into a hurricane, was driven south and went ashore near Matanzas. Her crew survived after clinging to the rigging for two days and a night."

Poor Mr. O'Donoghue! At long last, his ship has come in, and there's no treasure chest or piles of gold coins. And they probably won't let him keep the firewood.