As the day wore on, the great pile of canned soda, chips, fruit bars, mixed nuts, peanut butter sandwiches and bottled water became the center of activity. During high tides the two halves of Lunging are separated by a foot or two of seawater that rises over the exact spot where Prudy Randall says Blackbeard left his treasure and his thirteenth wife - never to return. There was a cave there, she believes, that has since collapsed or been covered somehow by nearly 300 years of storm and tide. After the Great War, she explains, the US Government was looking for buried treasure and spotted the hidden cave by air using some sort of sonar device. Later in the 1950s perhaps, a man from a quarrying company did some tests and indicated that a cave or buried ingots were possibly hidden there.
Exact details are hard to pin down.
Anticipating the encroaching flood, the team from Hager-Richter Geoscience quickly cordons off the treasure search zone with little red flags. No matter what they find, a barge with a drill rig is due in from Rockland, Maine the next day to make a small test hole through what appears to my untrained eye like a whole lot of rock that hasn't moved since long before human beings were pond scum. But no one is complaining. The geophysicists are happy as clams to be on the most beautiful island on the Shoals. It's a far cry from the hazardous waste dumps, landfills, highways and airports where they usually work.