Huge Anchor Found near St. Helena Sound

What started out as a normal day for us turned into a bizarre find! One of our shrimper clients called us from offshore one morning and explained that during the middle of the night, he had hung his nets on something "BIG" and could not break free from the entanglement. Apparently he had been a few miles offshore and had hung his huge trawling nets and was unable to retrieve them or even back his boat off of the entanglement.

Shrimpers call these entanglement hazards "hangs," and there are many things that can create them... Underwater rocks, old shipwrecks, sunken trees, or anything else that could ensnare a net and create a problem for a hard-working shrimpboat captain.

With the local waters having been fished and shrimped for generations, most "hangs" are well-documented and well-known by all commercial fishermen and shrimpers. In an effort to prevent offshore disasters and expensive damage, most professional fishermen and shrimpers share "hang numbers" in order to pool knowledge and avoid hazards.

In short, this shrimper had "hung" in an area that had no "hangs" - no expected hazards in the area. The oddest thing, though, was that he was unable to free his nets by reversing the engines or pulling on the nets with the boat's powerful winches.

DEEP SOUTH DIVERS deployed it's small, fast response vessel and sped to the hang site, just a few miles offshore, near the mouth of the St. Helena Sound. However, before we arrived, the captain called again and explained that it appeared that he was able to break his nets free from the hang. He further explained that he was still unable to pull his nets up and out of the water, and that he felt that whatever had hung him on the bottom was still in the nets! He was able to move, however, so his plan was to drag whatever he had back to port and deal with whatever was in his nets at the dock, where a powerful crane would be able to hoist his nets out of the water.

DEEP SOUTH DIVERS met the shrimper at the dock, and after an hour or two of work cutting, disentangling and hoisting, ended up with this on the dock:

After many telephone calls to Ashley Deming of the South Carolina Sport Diver Archaeology Management Program, it was decided that this anchor - measuring more than 9 feet long - had likely come from a large ship between the years of 1840 and 1875, based on it's design. It's size implies that a ship needing an anchor this large would be a few hundred feet in length at the least. As such, we theorize that it likely came from a Union warship during the Civil War circa 1862-1865. Additional support lending credence to the theory is the fact that the area where the anchor was found was a common anchorage for the Union Navy during the Battle of Port Royal and attacks and blockades on Charleston. We believe this anchor far too large for merchant or Confederate vessels of the time, although there were a few large passenger liners of the time that could have had an anchor like this. Perhaps we will never know - but our best guess is that it came from a Union warship.

The area around the anchor has been thoroughly sidescanned for remnants of a shipwreck or other debris, but no additional anomalies exist. Given the short length of chain connected to the anchor, we believe that the anchor was lost as the boat connected to it broke the chain... Broke free and became adrift. We feel it unlikely that the anchor was purposely cut free due to entanglement.