Local explorer Nick Vasicek was given a shipwreck tip-off by an old friend who found some gold coins on a remote beach over 40 years ago.

This old friend never found the actual shipwreck from which he suspected his coins had come from but once Cyclone Olga had blown through and stirred things up in January this year, Nick and his offsider Matt Whelden took a metal detector up to the secret beach location between Port Douglas and Cape Tribulation to check things out.

They were expecting to locate a few more gold coins mentioned in their old friends story but much to their surprise they actually located the remains of a complete ship buried in the sand.

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Cyclone Olga may not have bothered the far north area much when she blew on down the coast but she did manage to shift quite a few buckets of sand from this beach and expose the outline of this shipwreck from its previous burial site.

Imagine the surprise when the two explorers found the outline of the ship buried just 30/40cms below the sand.  And with just a little digging around the edges they realised they had uncovered a full sized ship about 70 feet long and 20 feet wide.  It's timber walls still had evidence of the ferrous metal linings of (probably) copper and iron, which is what their metal detector had originally picked up.

The wreck is apparently sitting high and dry on the beach at low tide but goes under shallow water at high tide just off shore.  So there's not a lot of time to work on the site between tides but so far no more gold coins have been discovered.  They have found no identifying marks on the ship to date so Nick asked his friends in the Yulanji tribe to see if any of their elders knew anything about the buried ship.

Just one of the tribal elders did remember his grandfather speaking of a buried ship but he had never seen it himself.  This information would indicate that the shipwreck must, therefore, have occurred over 100 years ago.

Armed with this information and the length of the ship, they did some preliminary research in the shipwreck archives and their first hunch indicates that it could be a coastal trader, which used to work between Melbourne and Cooktown, called the 'Index' which was lost in 1887 (location unknown). The 'Index' was in fact 72 feet long !

Nick has followed official protocol and reported the shipwreck find to the EPA with it's precise remote location.  It will be interesting, after their investigations are completed, to find out whether there will be anymore gold coins to discover or even additional treasures that may come to light.

Nick Vasicek is a modern day explorer based in Port Douglas.  He has recently been a regular on Channel 9 television presenting this latest buried shipwreck plus many of his other discoveries from Cape York right down the East Coast.  He tells us that he's actually got even more discoveries to showcase and some of it, if research is confirmed, may challenge history as we know it!