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A year later Fisher called on the services of Eugene Lyon. He had been researching a doctoral thesis on the historical Spanish presence in Florida at the government archives in Seville, Spain, where Fisher was a frequent visitor. After poring over 50,000 pages of worm-eaten documents, Lyon turned up information that pointed the way to the Atocha: the original 17th century salvors' report indicated that the treasure ship could be found near the desolate Marquesas Keys, off Key West.
Fisher immediately sent his divers to the area, and instructed them to investigate a 3-sq.-mi. patch of underwater reef ten miles southwest of the Marquesas. He was relying on the supposition that the Atocha had probably split asunder on the reef. But a small find that at first seemed encouraging led him astray. In 1973 Fisher's boat, the Virgalona, hauled up his first Atocha finds, an anchor and three silver bars, some two miles or so from the site that Fisher had targeted. Says McHaley: "I wish we had never found them. It was a false lead that cost us years." The random wreckage from the lost ship had been scattered by a second hurricane centuries before. In the end, the main lode was found very near the reef where Fisher thought it would be.
"Two weeks ago, I couldn't make the payroll," says Fisher. A onetime Hobart, Ind., poultry farmer, Fisher went to Florida specifically to hunt for underwater fortune. Underwater exploration has been his obsession almost from the age of eleven, when, back in Indiana, he made a homespun diving helmet out of a 5-gal. paint can and nearly drowned trying it out. After he arrived in Key West in 1970 and began salvaging, Fisher became a fabled local character on an island where there is considerable competition for such distinction. For years he lived in an old houseboat and drove a $600 used Mercury. He has made millions from finds smaller than the Atocha, some of them wrecks of its sister ship, but he has spent millions looking for the Atocha. Now he wears an estimated $12,000 worth of gold around his neck, including a Spanish doubloon, and he drives a Cadillac.
Ever since Fisher began his Florida-coast searches, his business has been a family operation. His wife Dolores still dives, and was once a world endurance champion. Along with Taffi and Kane, another son Kim, 29, helped recover the treasure. But the mom-and-pop hunt has had its dark side. Ten years to the day before last month's discovery, the Fishers' eldest son Dirk, 21, Dirk's wife and another diver were drowned when their salvage ship, the Northwind, capsized at night during a squall.