HOT NEWS !

From Seeking Alpha - Mark Gordon Call Transcript

"Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today to discuss Odyssey Marine Exploration’s Third Quarter Results ended September 30, 2014. With us today are Mark Gordon, Odyssey’s Chief Executive Officer and President as well as Philip Devine, the company’s Chief Financial Officer.

Following their remarks, we will open up call for your question. Then before we conclude today’s call I’ll provide the necessary precautions regarding forward-looking statements made by management during this call as well as a special note to U.S. investors regarding disclosure of mineral deposits as referenced in the SEC’s Industry Guide 7.

We would like to remind everyone that this call is available for replay through December 10, 2014 starting later this evening. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in company’s earnings release as well as available on Odyssey’s website.

During this call, you can also send written questions by sending them via the webcast system. We may not have time to take everyone’s questions but if you submit questions via the webcast system we will answer all remaining questions via email after the call.

Now I’d like to turn the call over to CEO Mark Gordon. Please go ahead, sir.

Mark Gordon - Chairman & CEO

Well thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, thank you for joining us. This is my first conference call since taking over as CEO and I want to thank all of you who have expressed their congratulations and support over the past month or so. I hit the ground running in my new position and we’ve already started implementing refinements to the business plan. We want Odyssey to be the company investors want to invest in, the place the best and the brightest want to work, and an organization our partners want to do business with.

We understand that our shareholders and the investment community want us to maintain a business model of leveraged returns but they also want us to focus of financial discipline in our business planning to generate more cash inflows from operations and from our investments.

To this end, we've recently implemented and improved investment analysis process which I believe will have a great impact on our business planning process. I believe that in our future filings and calls you’ll see a significant and positive transformation in our operating results.

In the few short months since our last call, we made significant progress on our shipwreck and mineral projects. We completed the 2014 season’s recovery operations at the SS Central America shipwreck site where we recovered more than 15,500 silver and gold coins, 45 gold ingots, gold dust, nuggets, jewelry and various other artifacts.

We installed and are currently testing a new state of the art deep ocean search systems acquired for use in our deep ocean 20th century shipwreck and mineral exploration programs"....

Full article...

By John McDermott - The Post and Courier

A deep-sea salvage vessel that's been pulling up gold and other treasure from a shipwreck off South Carolina has returned to Charleston and likely won't resume work at the site until next year.

Florida-based Odyssey Marine Exploration Inc. said Tuesday that its Odyssey Explorer is back in port for a few weeks for repairs and to be upfitted with new equipment.

The company said it ended its first recovery phase after retrieving more than 15,500 gold and silver coins, 45 gold bars and hundreds of nuggets, jewelry and other artifacts from the SS Central America. The value of the items was not disclosed.

Odyssey Explorer left Charleston in April. The wreck of the SS Central America is in 7,200 feet of water about 200 miles off the coast, Odyssey Marine said.

Mark Gordon, the Tampa-based company's president and chief operating officer, said in a statement that it was "an appropriate time to suspend recovery operations to take a break for repairs and review the work we've recently completed."

Recovery efforts were hampered in recent weeks by Hurricane Cristobal and by the time required to complete a high-resolution video survey of the wreck and surrounding area, the company said.

Odyssey Marine said "an extensive amount of knowledge has been gained" about the site and the scope of the work required.

"Significant sections of the ship's structure, associated cultural heritage artifacts and coins were located some distance from the main shipwreck area, requiring excavation over a large area," the company said Tuesday.

"Sizable areas remain to be inspected and excavated outside the main shipwreck."

Gordon said the next step is to study the data collected over the past five months.

Full story...

By Kate Allen - The Star

On Aug. 5, 1997, a legal adviser for Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department signed a two-page document. Three days later, the British High Commissioner to Canada did the same.

From The Guardian

The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in northern Michigan has received federal approval to expand its size nearly tenfold and boost the preservation of scores of sunken vessels in an area of Lake Huron once known as “Shipwreck Alley”.

Thunder Bay, the only freshwater national sanctuary, is announcing on Friday that the Obama administration has approved the years-in-the-making effort to grow from about 450 square miles to 4,300 square miles.

The expansion — which incorporates the waters from off Alcona, Alpena and Presque Isle in the north-eastern Lower Peninsula and to the maritime border with Canada — also doubles the number of estimated shipwrecks to roughly 200.

The effort to expand the sanctuary, originally created in 2000, started with three failed congressional bids and then the administrative review process through the Commerce Department.

The department oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the sanctuary along with the state of Michigan.

“It’s been a long, long effort,” the sanctuary superintendent, Jeff Gray, said.

“It’s a pretty monumental thing ... In a small way we raise the Great Lakes into this national dialogue.”

While many spots along the Great Lakes are hazardous,Thunder Bay became known as “Shipwreck Alley” in the 19th century, as it was part of a major shipping channel during an era when the region had few alternatives.

Full story...

From CBC News

A ship that once belonged to Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen will not be moved from Cambridge Bay this year, despite a Norwegian group's plans to salvage the Maud this summer.

The Maud has been partially submerged in the waters near the community for more than 80 years.

The Norwegian group Maud Returns Home plans to move it back to the town where it was built a century ago. 

But ice in the Northwest Passage has delayed a tug and a special submersible barge arriving from Norway. The vessels left Norway in the middle of June to make the 7,000-kilometre trip.

They should arrive in Cambridge Bay on the weekend but that may not leave enough time to raise the ship.

"Most likely we will not be able to lift Maud before the freeze up," said Jan Wanggaard.

"We will just do some preliminary testing of the principles and then we will wait until next year in the spring to do the lifting operation. That's how I think it will happen now."

Wanggaard has been in Cambridge Bay for several weeks. He and another diver are clearing away the loose material and debris around the Maud.

Full story...

By Karla Zabludovsky - Newsweek

More than 2,900 gold coins and 45 gold ingots have been recovered from the shipwrecked S.S. Central America since an archaeological excavation began in mid-April, Odyssey Marine Exploration, the company contracted to dive to the site, revealed on a report published Tuesday.

Other 19th century artifacts recovered include luggage pieces, a pistol, a pocket watch, and several daguerreotypes, an early type of photography.

Several samples of coral and sea anemones have also been collected through a science program which is studying deep sea biological diversity.

Pine and oak specimens placed on the seabed in 1990 and 1991, during the last known dives to the shipwreck site, are being retrieved so that scientists can study the “shipworms” consuming and destroying the ship’s timbers.

“The insights provided by this experiment have provided valuable new information about the degradation of shipwrecks in this environment, and it greatly aids our interpretation of the conditions we are observing on this site and can expect of other shipwrecks in similar circumstances,” says one of the reports previously released by Odyssey Marine Exploration.

The S.S. Central America sank off the Carolina coast in 1857, at the height of the California Gold Rush, when it sailed into a hurricane.

It had departed, days earlier, from Panama, with roughly 580 passengers who were carrying with them an unknown amount of gold.

Estimates for the total gold cargo range between three and 21 tons of gold.

Full story...

From The Scotsman

Divers stand on the edge of a small wooden fishing boat ­gazing at the murky, choppy waters below.

After receiving blessings from Buddhist monks, they lower their masks and plunge one-by-one into the mighty Rangoon River, clinging to garden hoses that will act as primitive breathing devices during their dizzying descent into darkness.

From the shoreline, thousands of spectators look on, some peering through binoculars, praying the men will find what other salvage crews have not: the world’s largest copper bell, believed to have been lying deep beneath the riverbed for more than four centuries.

Weighing an estimated 270 tons, the mysterious bell is a symbol of pride for many in a nation of 60 million that only recently emerged from a half-century of military rule and self-imposed isolation.

And for the first time, search crews are largely relying on spirituality rather than science to try to find it.

Burma’s superstitious leaders have in years past been part of a colourful cast of characters who believe reclaiming the treasure is important if the nation is ever to regain its position of glory as the crown jewel of Asia.

It is a story of myth and mystery.

King Dhammazedi, after whom the bell was named, was said to have ordered it cast in the late 15th century, donating it soon after to the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s most sacred temple which sits on a hilltop in the old capital, Rangoon.

The bell remained there for more than 130 years, when it was said to have been stolen by Portuguese mercenary Philip de Brito, who wanted to take it across the river so it could be melted down and turned into cannons for his ships.

With tremendous difficulty, his men rolled the massive bell down a hill and transferred it to a rickety vessel, which then sank under the weight.

Most people in Burma believe the bell is still lying deep beneath the riverbed, buried under layers of silt.

Full story...

By Matt Soergel - The St Augustine Record

On a sunny, breezy Saturday, this is an inviting place — the sea placid, the coastline green and still wild.

But from a diving boat a half-mile offshore, Chuck Meide can easily picture the desperate straits of the men of Jean Ribault’s doomed French fleet, fighting for their lives on perhaps this very spot, 449 years ago.

Their struggle as a hurricane drove their ships unmercifully toward the land. Their fear as the ships broke up, throwing the sailors into the stormy seas, clinging to any bit of wreckage they could find. Their relief at making it to the sand.

Their awful knowledge that they were stranded here, on the low coastline of a vast mysterious land, thousands of miles from home.

And their certainty that their enemy — men sworn to kill them — was still out there, still looking for them.

The French, who were trying to defend a colony in what is now Jacksonville, left signs of their presence at Canaveral: tools, jewelry and coins have been found at a survivors’ camp on the beach.

Where, though, are their four ships ?

After three weeks of searching the ocean floor, an expedition from the St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum is no closer to finding out.

Meide, the principal investigator on the group, spent most of those weeks on the water, looking during the day and sleeping fitfully on the cramped vessel — “It’s no Carnival cruise,” he said — at night.

He was philosophical about it as the group wrapped up its search.

“It’s a big ocean,” he said.

Ribault’s fleet came to Florida in 1565 to support the struggling French colony at Fort Caroline. The Spanish, under Pedro Menendez de Aviles, arrived about the same time, with plans to wipe out the French.

Full story...