Blackbeard

Blackbeard: The crew of the Cape Fear Community College and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington recovered from 2,500 to 3,000 pound anchor from the wreck of Blackbeard's flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge Friday. It is 11 feet, 4 inches long with weapons that are 7 feet, 7 inches wide, but believe it or not, this is only the third major anchor at the site.The ship had multiple anchors ranging from wee 160-pound grapnels like the one retrieved in October 2009, to emergency behemoths deployed during storms. This one was probably the ship’s everyday anchor. The only remaining parts of the ship — the wooden hull structure, ribs and a plank are at the bottom of the pile, protected by ballast that kept the ship upright. Six cannon and three other anchors are also in the pile. Wendy Welsh, field conservator and QAR lab manager, and archaeologist Chris Southerly dived in the Atlantic to hook up the anchor for its lift to the ocean surface. “It lifted great,” said Welsh, who have worked with the project for nine years. “I didn’t think I’d see this day so soon.” The team had originally planned to recover the second largest, is 13 feet long with arms that are 8 feet in diameter and weighs 3.000 pounds less, on Thursday to meet with the adverse weather conditions that have been forced to postpone the attempt for a day. Among them the largest would be easier to get, as it is above the ballast pile, but was too rooted in the objects used for ballast, decided to go for number three, on the hillside. Given the configuration of other parts of the ship, it is likely that plunges the future to recover artifacts from the side of the battery and the ballast. Southerly compared the retrieval to the child’s game of Pick-Up-Sticks, where players toss plastic sticks on a hard surface and then remove them one at a time without disturbing the ones underneath. “It’s really satisfying that I’ve had privilege of seeing it,” he said. The anchor is now in the North Carolina Maritime Museum artifact repository where it will undergo years of conservation. The grapple is small for two more years in the conservation and still no card ready. So much larger anchor with much larger concretion (the layer of hardened concrete-like ocean debris that formed around the iron leaching), it will take four years estimated to attention before it is stabilized.