Kip Wagner and the Real Eight in Sebastian, Florida

Kip Wagner, a building contractor living in Wabasso, led the modern recovery of the 1715 Fleet off the beaches south of Sebastian Inlet through the Real Eight Company, incorporated in 1961 (1715 Fleet Society).

A contractor by trade who lived in Wabasso (1715 Fleet Society tribute), Wagner was born in Miamisburg, Ohio in 1906 (Real Eight documents archive). He first visited Florida in the winter of 1921, moved to the state permanently in the mid 1940s, and was hired to build the Penn-Wood Motel in Wabasso, settling his family in a small house nearby (1715 Fleet Society tribute). His research partner was a local physician, Dr. Kip Kelso (1715 Fleet Society tribute).

The 1715 Fleet had been lost for more than two centuries by then. A hurricane caught the Spanish silver fleet on July 31, 1715, and eight ships wrecked on reefs from present-day Fort Pierce to Wabasso; about 1,000 of the 2,500 sailors and passengers died (NOAA AOML). Spanish crews salvaged much of the cargo from camps on the beach, and what they left stayed in the sand and shallow reefs of the Indian River County coast.

Wagner was not the first to notice the camp. Charles D. Higgs examined the dunes south of Sebastian Inlet in late 1941 or early 1942, and in 1946 Hale G. Smith, assistant state archaeologist for the Florida Park Service, suggested the site was the remains of the 1715 Plate Fleet wreck (Florida Park Service history lesson, 2013). A hurricane in 1955 washed away dunes around the camps and exposed artifacts and silver coins, which touched off the salvage efforts of local builder Kip Wagner and his Real 8 Company (NOAA AOML).

Wagner tied his Wabasso beach coins to the 1715 Fleet using their dates, a 1775 map that placed the lost fleet where he was finding coins, and Spanish archive papers pointing to a salvage camp near Sebastian Inlet.

The first clue was on the sand. Walking the beach for driftwood, Wagner picked up worn Spanish silver, and none of his coins were dated after 1715, which pointed to one disaster rather than a scatter of losses (Real Eight documents archive).

The map came next. Dr. Kelso traveled to Washington D.C. in the summer of 1959 and found at the Library of Congress a copy of Bernard Romans' 1775 book A Concise Natural History of East and West Florida (Real Eight documents archive). Its map carried the note: Opposite this River, perished, the Admiral, commanding the Plate Fleet 1715, and the archive notes that this was the exact location where Wagner was finding his coins. The two men then wrote to the archives in Seville, Spain, and one document they received indicated that a salvage camp had been set up near the Sebastian Inlet after the fleet was destroyed (1715 Fleet Society tribute).

Wagner went looking for that camp in the dunes south of Sebastian Inlet. Equipped with a $15.00 war surplus military mine detector and an old hound dog, he found it (Real Eight documents archive). He then obtained a nonexclusive salvage lease from the State of Florida to explore and salvage wrecks along a 50 mile stretch of coast south of Sebastian Inlet. The lease provided that Wagner would give the state 25 percent of what he found (Florida Park Service history lesson, 2013).

The Real Eight Company was incorporated in 1961 by eight partners: Kip Wagner, Kip Kelso, Dan Thompson, Harry Cannon, Lou Ullian, Del Long, Erv Taylor and Lisbon Futch (1715 Fleet Society glossary).

Wagner had the camp and the lease but needed divers. The divers came through Lou Ullian, an ex Navy man who started at the Air Force Missile Test Range at Cape Canaveral in 1959; diving led him to Del Long, who ran a shop at Patrick Air Force Base, and to Erv Taylor, and Dan Thompson, a Colonel in the Air Force and an expert diver, joined as well (Real Eight documents archive). Lisbon Futch found a 40 foot launch in Norfolk, Virginia, dubbed the Sampan, which became the group's first real salvage vessel; in that first season of exploration the team brought up cannonballs, pottery, timbers and nails but no treasure (Real Eight documents archive).

On April 17, 1961 the new corporation elected officers and distributed shares, and a November 7, 1961 Contract for Exploration between the State of Florida, acting through the Trustees of the Internal Improvement Fund, and the Real Eight Company set the terms for work on the wrecks (Real Eight documents archive). The glossary adds that the company was first to obtain leases from the State of Florida for the fleet sites, and that Bob Johnson, John Jones and Rex Stocker joined later (1715 Fleet Society glossary).

The Real Eight's signature finds came from the Cabin Wreck near Sebastian, starting with 3,500 to 4,000 silver coins on January 8, 1961 and the first intact 1715 Fleet treasure chest on July 24, 1965.

On that January day the team recovered between 3,500 and 4,000 silver coins, most fused into two large clumps, one weighing an estimated 77 pounds and containing approximately 1,500 to 2,000 coins (Real Eight documents archive). The coins lay in three fathoms, about 18 feet, of water, and the clumps were the remains of coins once packed in cloth bags inside a small wooden box (1715 Fleet Society). Most clumps were broken up for their coins. The surviving one, the largest aggregate known to exist from the 1715 Fleet, is held in the State of Florida's collection of 1715 Fleet artifacts in Tallahassee. The same Fleet Society page gives its weight as 55.6 pounds in one place and 55.9 pounds in another, so either figure appears in print.

The Cabin Wreck kept producing. A team of Real Eight divers found a nearly intact treasure chest at the Cabin Wreck site near Sebastian on July 24, 1965, the first of its kind on any 1715 Fleet wreck, and a second chest came up nearby in June 1967 (1715 Fleet Society).

The State of Florida tracked its share closely. Auditors appointed by the state inventoried Real Eight findings to set the state's 25 percent, and the inventory, dated July 21, 1964, runs to ten pages (Real Eight documents archive). By 1964 Wagner's company had teamed up with Mel Fisher's Treasure Salvors, and by the end of that year the partners had reportedly recovered more than $3 million of gold, silver, jewelry and artifacts (Florida Park Service history lesson, 2013). From its start to the mid 1970s the company recovered the lion's share of the treasure the Spanish did not salvage (1715 Fleet Society glossary).

The McLarty Treasure Museum at the south boundary of Sebastian Inlet State Park, built on a survivors camp of the 1715 Spanish Plate Fleet, is the public museum for the story near Sebastian (Florida State Parks).

The museum has artifacts, displays and an observation deck over the ocean. The McLarty Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and closed Mondays and Tuesdays. Entry fee for the McLarty Museum is $2 a person, and the final film of the day starts at 3:15 p.m. (Florida State Parks). Sebastian Inlet State Park is at 9700 South Highway A1A, charges $8 per vehicle and answers at 321-984-4852 (Florida State Parks).

Three practical points from the state park pages, checked October 14, 2026. First, the park hours page still prints an older line headed July 2023 that lists McLarty as open seven days a week, directly above the current Wednesday through Sunday schedule (Florida State Parks hours and fees); the Wednesday through Sunday line matches the amenities page. Second, the park's south gate changed on Nov. 12, 2025: its ranger station now follows park hours, 8 a.m. to sunset, and only the north station runs 24 hours. Third, the park alert says beach access from the south side is unavailable due to construction (Florida State Parks). With those changes, a call to the park office before a weekday trip to the McLarty saves a wasted drive from Sebastian.

Wagner's own account is the other lasting record. NOAA AOML lists his January 1965 National Geographic article, Drowned Galleons Yield Spanish Gold, and the 1966 book Pieces of Eight, written with L.B. Taylor Jr., among its references on the 1715 Fleet (NOAA AOML). The 1715 Fleet Society calls the book a classic in the shipwreck community (1715 Fleet Society tribute).

Kip Wagner retired from the Real Eight in 1970, died on February 26, 1972 at 66, and the company he led out of Wabasso and Sebastian was dissolved in 1984 (1715 Fleet Society).

Before that, Wagner was the company's public face. He was the prime mover in arranging the first public auction of 1715 Fleet coins in October 1964 (1715 Fleet Society glossary). On May 1, 1965 a Real Eight museum opened next to the First National Bank of Satellite Beach, about 35 miles north of Sebastian, and more than 25,000 people visited in its first half year; in July 1968 the collection moved to a Museum of Sunken Treasure at Cape Canaveral, which a former member recalled closing in 1974 (Real Eight documents archive).

The company's 1970 annual report records that Wagner, founder and chairman of the board, reached retirement age and retired at the end of the fiscal year; Harry E. Cannon became chairman and John P. Jones president on August 13, 1970 (Real Eight documents archive). Wagner died two years later, on February 26, 1972 (1715 Fleet Society tribute).

The wider legacy is the name on the map. NOAA AOML states that the discovery led to the establishment of a state park and museum and to the area being dubbed the Treasure Coast (NOAA AOML).