KEY WEST, Florida (AP) -- Melanie Carter didn't expect to discover sunken treasure. She was just enjoying some scuba diving off the Florida Keys, happy to get away from work for the weekend.
Instead, she came across the find of a lifetime.
"I was exploring some of the sunken ships that are all over the place out there," she explained. "I've been through them lots of times, and so have a million other tourists. This time, though, I saw a flash of gold, and when I investigated, I found it."
"It" turned out to be a tremendous ring made entirely of solid gold, weighing well over one hundred and fifty pounds.
"Fortunately I'm pretty strong," explained the petite 25-year-old, a waitress here in Key West. "I do a lot of working out, you know. Since it's round, I just rolled the ring into the boat with the help of a couple of ropes. It took a while, but I was NOT going to just leave it down there, where someone else could come along and find it!"
Historians reviewing the discovery are baffled by the unusual artifact, which bears no identifying marks and does not show up in any transport records of known shipwrecks. It has been suggested that Melanie came across a fragment of a wreck not previously known, though when questioned, she understandably would not reveal its precise location. "I might want to go back and look through it some more," she laughed.
Interestingly, the ring was surprisingly light for such a volume of gold, as though filled with numerous air pockets. "It's a mystery, all right," said Marcus Riddick, curator of the Miami Museum of Caribbean History, where the relic is expected to reside. "It's almost perfectly round, which would have been difficult to produce in such a scale during the time these shipwrecks occurred."
"It's almost like a giant's wedding ring," Riddick suggested.
Melanie, shown here posing with her treasure prior to its sale to the museum (photo provided by Riddick), estimates her net profit after taxes for her weekend dive trip to be well over $2,500,000.
Will she continue to dive? "Sure," said the wealthy waitress, who admits she's dreamed of such a find ever since she took up scuba diving as a hobby in 1991. "Now I can afford to take some trips to places where I couldn't get to before."
With that kind of money, she can probably go anywhere she likes.
(Thanks to Riddick for the pic!)