In 1715, eleven Spanish galleons were wrecked by a hurricane against this shoreline. Bound for Spain out of Havana, the fleet was laden with gold, silver, and jewels gathered from across the New World. The storm caught the ships in late July and drove them onto the reefs, and as many as a thousand sailors lost their lives along this coast. Their cargo — a fortune in coin and bullion — scattered across the shallows, and for two and a half centuries much of it lay just off these beaches, waiting. Two hundred and forty years later, a builder named Kip Wagner bent down on this beach for a piece of driftwood and found a blackened silver coin. He and his nephew, Rex Stocker, along with Dr. Kip Kelso and the Real Eight Company, recovered a fortune — and gave this coast its name.

Kip Wagner was my great uncle: his wife, Alice, was my grandfather's sister. My father, Rex Stocker, is Kip's nephew — and today the last living member of the Real Eight Company. The Galleon House was Kip and Alice's family home; The Doubloon Cottage was Kip's retreat and his war room, its fireplace built from ballast stones recovered from the 1715 Fleet itself. Whichever house you stay in, you are staying inside the story — not beside it.

The Story in Print

National Geographic

Kip Wagner told the story of the discovery himself in the pages of National Geographic, January 1965 — the celebrated article “Drowned Galleons Yield Spanish Gold.”

Pieces of Eight

He told it again in full in his book, Pieces of Eight: Recovering the Riches of a Lost Spanish Treasure Fleet.

Photographs and clippings from the family archive are on their way to this page.