Back in late February of 2013 we had a Nor’easter that come through and knocked out the steps to the beach at our other second house named Sea Notes which is on the oceanfront (see more about it on the links page). The steps were knocked out for the second time during the same winter (we had to have them rebuilt twice that winter). After the storm had passed, we noticed a piece of a shipwreck on our beach front as seen in the pictures below:
I’ve forgotten the exact sequence, but at some point we talked to Bob, the owner of the “round” house next door to Sea Notes and found out that he had some experience with shipwrecks on the beach. He had earlier found a piece of a shipwreck that was part of an early 1600’s ship and which had been examined and taken away by the the scholars at the the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras. Bob noticed another piece of the shipwreck in another photo and actually offered a reward to renters of his house if they found it (see the photo below).
Meanwhile, we spoke to the people at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum and they were very interested in our piece of shipwreck. The beach level was very low and over the next week or so the piece moved a bit. It ended up lodged under an old piece of beach stairs, just at the northern edge of our property and a couple of feet further out from where our stairs end. At that point one of the representatives from the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum came out and spent several hours studying the piece but determined it probably wasn’t part of the very old shipwreck, but might be a couple of hundred years old. It has stayed in the same place, wedged in, and if the beach is real low, or if you dig down just a little you might see it. (Of course, now with the beach nourishment, it is probably 10 or more feet underground.)
