Ship searches for sunken treasure off Fla.

MIAMI, March 26 (UPI) -- A treasure-hunting ship has spent the past few weeks off the Florida coast looking for a Spanish galleon that may have wrecked there in 1715.

"This could be the real deal," Doug Pope told The Miami Herald. "The research says a shipwreck should be there."

Pope and his company, Amelia Research & Recovery, learned about the site of the possible shipwreck from retired U.S. Navy sailor Dave Jordan. Jordan was a 15-year-old surfer in 1978 when a wave tossed him below the surface and he spotted some black tubes sticking out of the sand.

"I swam down and grabbed onto one," he told the Herald. "I thought to myself, Man, these are cannons.'" Jordan said he kept his find a secret until he told Pope, who spent two years getting the necessary permits to go looking for the cannons and any other buried treasure off Tiger Shores Beach.

So far, the treasure recovery ship Polly-L's search has cost about $50,000 and turned up a shard of 19th-century pottery.

"This job can be frustrating sometimes," Pope told the Herald. "But if it isn't the greatest adventure in the world, I don't know what is."