Yo Ho Ho , Me Matey - Mel Fisher and Yours Truly

Kanye West?  KEY WEST!

I struck up a rich friendship with "Treasure Salvor" Mel Fisher in 1985, when he found the Atocha shipwreck and its incredible $450,000,000 bounty of gold coins, mountains of emeralds, and other riches just miles off the coast of Key West....

 The National Geographic Society had supported Mel's research with expedition grants, much as they had supported Bob Ballard in his quest to locate the Titanic.  In a barter for exclusive rights to 'break the story' in its own pages, NGS funded numerous promising, interesting explorers, expeditionists and researchers such as Jane Goodall (chimps), Dian Fossey (gorillas), Louis and Richard Leakey (homo erecti), and Sylvia Earle (sharks) - along with aforementioned gents Ballard et Fisher.  In 1985-86, both of these gentlemanly bets would pay off spectacularly.

"The Atocha Motherlode" as it is known amounted to nearly half a $Billion worth of gold and silver - over 40 tons (and the intervening years have been very kind to the commodity price of precious metals).

Mine, Mine, it's all Mine ...

Even as Mel began hauling the Atocha loot to the surface, word reverberated around the Geographic headquarters - and especially within the TV Division, where our leader Dennis Kane had earlier made a personal investment in Salvors, Inc. (the romance of discovery aside, Fisher is a shrewd businessman; note the prominence given Investor Relations on Fisher's site).

Mel Fisher had to fight the state of Florida over ownership of the trove (Mel won it all at the Supreme Court; he's donated 20% of the find to FL).

We were prepared, and we hastily accelerated a prime time documentary to air on WTBS as a Sunday evening National Geographic Explorer Special.  On Thursday of that week, a panicked call came from Atlanta, where the ad sales office at TBS had noted Mel's personal purchase of a pair of spots, to air during Explorer, in which he personally pitched jewels, coins and artifacts with an (800) #, direct to viewers.

It was the cheesiest commercial imaginable: home-made production values like you'd see in a spot for a local car dealership, Mel draped in gold chains over a Hawaiian shirt, glowing and lit up like W. C. Fields.

Total Class!

The National Geographic saw its sterling reputation for taste, quality and accuracy about to go down the drain! ... and instructed my boss Tim Kelly to talk Mel out of the buy, which he did.

The special, "Atocha: Quest for Treasure" was a giant hit, eclipsed only a year later when we presented "Secrets of the Titanic" following Ballard's histrionic find.  In both cases, we in the hated TV Division had to fight the powers that were, in order to scoop the Magazine where 'breaking news' could be turned into a cover story.. 9 months later at earliest.  So we had to vanquish Bill Garrett and the magaziners in order to get on the air.

Swashbucklers Two: Fisher & Porter

We were victorious in our little battle, so was Mel in his grand quest, and That's The Way It Was.