GREEN COVE SPRINGS – Kip Wagner got bored and was scouring the beach between Fort Pierce and Sebastian Inlet, where nobody believed anything of significance was hidden among the dunes and sea oats, when he suddenly heard a ping.

He used a mine sweeper, because portable metal detectors were difficult to use and not widely available.

“The story that I heard was, he was tenacious, a very, very meticulous guy,” Michael Bozeman said. “He retired, got tired of hanging out in little beach bars, and started walking down the beach after a storm. He found a trail and started finding coins with this thing (mine sweeper). He found a concentration of coins coming up on the beach. He got a boat, and within a month or so, he found a couple of million dollars' worth of silver and gold. You know, it's a pretty crazy story.”

That was 66 years ago, in 1959. But Bozeman’s search for treasure continues.

As the captain of Green Cove Springs-moored Polly L, he knows the sea beckons with a never-ending promise of intrigue and mystery. Years of misses are part of the life of being a treasure hunter, because it just takes one strike to make history.

“We don’t sell a promise to find treasure,” Bozeman said. “We sell adventure.”

Bozeman works for Amelia Research and Recovery, which Middleburg’s Doug Pope owns. They met 17 years ago.

“He gave me his card and said, 'Anytime you want, come on down, you can go to work because we need somebody, we need somebody to go to work,'” Bozeman said. “He had this ship that takes a lot of work. They were working her hard, and this boat was really going downhill. When I came aboard, I was chipping rust, and I'm still chipping rust.”

The Polly L is a lift boat with a 10-ton crane, which means it has three pontoons that can raise the working platform. It has an excavator and can dredge through a sluice box that can operate 24 hours a day. Since the pontoons can raise the deck above the waves, and there are comfortable quarters, it can stay at sea for as long as 120 days, which saves time with no daily commutes.

Being at sea doesn’t guarantee striking riches, however. The most famous treasure hunter is Mel Fisher. He found the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha that sank in the Florida Straits in the Florida Keys during a 1662 hurricane.

Fisher’s find was worth approximately $400 million — the State of Florida kept $100 million of the treasure, and Fisher’s family kept the rest. It took Fisher more than 16 years to find the shipwreck, and he motivated his crew by telling them, “Today’s the day.”

Pope, who's still looking for partners, has been looking for other ships from two 1715 Spanish Treasure Fleets for 19 years. The ships were loaded with gold and silver from Havana and sank along the Florida coast, lost in a hurricane headed from the New World to Spain.

Pope leased a nine-mile-long and two-mile-wide swath of ocean from the state's southern tip of Amelia Island after small piles of coins were found on the shoreline.

The process starts with a GPS antenna on the crane head, which is equipped with a magnetometer that detects anomalies like nails and silver coins from 300-year-old Spanish ships.

From there, the crew uses two 238-inch bow thrusters powered by 300-horsepower diesel engines to propel water to the ocean floor and bedrock.

“In a 15-to-20-minute period, it moves a lot of material. After that, a diver will see what the berm looks like. How big is the berm? We go down to the clay. Once we found a cannon on top of the clay,” Bozeman said.

Then the ship moves a few feet left or right and the process starts anew.

Remember, the search field near Amiela Island is 18 square miles.

“The reason they found small piles of coins is some of the crew washed up on shore, and they had coins in their pockets,” Bozeman said. “There is a lot of research that goes into this.”

Amelia Research and Recovery believes in preserving historical data and protecting the environment. While some criticize the recovery of artifacts, the crew of the Polly L thinks it can be accomplished by following established archaeological guidelines and reporting procedures.

“If we find something, we call the state and make sure we get a state-certified archeologist on board,” Bozeman said. “When they do archeological digs on land, they create a grid. It’s different on water, but we kind of do that by mapping each hole with the long/lat (longitude and latitude).”

Bozeman said the state must clear all treasure found. If it’s a piece unique to the Florida collection, the state can remove it from the find. What it doesn’t keep is returned to the treasure hunters.

"This industry has supplied everything in Tallahassee in the Natural History Museum,” Bozman said.

There is a reason Florida’s East Coast is known as the Treasure Coast. In 1715, Spanish ships loaded with gold, silver, pearls, diamonds and other jewels sank and were dispersed from Amelia Island to South Florida by a hurricane. The estimated treasure value that hasn’t yet been recovered is more than $400 million.

“It’s out there,” Bozeman. “Somebody’s going to find it.”

The Polly L has been looking for 19 years.