CLEARWATER, FL--(Marketwired - May 8, 2017) - Endurance Exploration Group, Inc., (OTCQB: EXPL) ("Endurance" or the "Company"), a company specializing in shipwreck research, survey and recovery, announces that, operating through its joint-venture, Swordfish Partners (the "Joint Venture"), the Company has located and conducted preliminary survey operations on a ship wreck site that is believed to be the remnants of an early 1800s American, wooden-hulled, passenger steam ship ("American Passenger Steam Ship" or "Target") located some forty (40) miles off the coast of North Carolina.
Based upon the Company's research files and the research and other data contributed by its joint venture partner, Deep Blue Exploration, LLC dba Marex, the Company, operating through its Joint Venture, conducted side-scan sonar search and survey operations off the coast of North Carolina during the spring of this year. The Company has located what it believes to be the remnants of its targeted search during this phase of its operations, an American Passenger Steam Ship, which may contain a valuable cargo of passenger artifacts, specie, and jewelry. The wreck site lies some forty miles off the coast of North Carolina and the wreckage pattern, debris field, machinery characteristics, and other information leads the Company to believe it is possibly the American Passenger Steam Ship that was the subject and Target of the Company's Joint Venture search.
The Company's Joint Venture expects to conduct additional survey operations in the near term, in an effort to positively identify the wreckage as its Target and, if warranted, move the project from a survey operation to a salvage operation beginning in the summer of this year.
Endurance CEO, Micah J. Eldred, further commented, "We are very pleased with the results of our initial search and survey for this recently discovered shipwreck. If ultimately confirmed as the subject of our targeted search, the American Passenger Steamship may represent a unique opportunity for our Company and our shareholders. Based upon our archival research, we believe passengers lost significant amounts of specie and valuables on the American Passenger Steamship we have been searching for, and the location of this wreck site, if positively confirmed, may represent a salvage process that should prove to be less technically challenging and less costly than some of the other, deep-water, projects we are working on."
Endurance's Joint Venture has petitioned the U.S. Federal Courts for the Middle District of Florida for a claim of the shipwreck, an appointment of the Joint Venture as substitute custodian of the shipwreck and a salvage award or title to the shipwreck and its cargo. If granted, Endurance plans to return to the wreck site to conduct salvage operations, beginning in 2017.