Next to a 7-11 convenience store on 8th Avenue, about a half block from the beach, in the New Jersey shore community of Belmar, there is a tall sewer standpipe, a vertical vent designed to carry the noxious smells from the local sewers. What is unusual about the sewer vent is that there is a small historical plaque at its base. (Or at least, there was a historical marker. Belmar was hit hard by Superstorm Sandy last year, so I don’t know the status of the plaque.)
The historical marker has nothing to do with Belmar’s sewer system. The “pipe” is, in fact, the foremast of the sailing ship Malta, which sank just offshore on November 24, 1885. The wreck of the Malta is still visible from the beach.
The sailing ship Malta began its life in 1851, as Queen of the South, a three masted iron hulled auxiliary steamer with four boilers and two inclined 2 cylinder engines developing 800 horsepower driving a single screw. She had a speed of 9 knots and had accommodations for 130 passengers.
It is a conical shaped structure built of boulders, roughly 230 feet in diameter, 30 feet high and weighing an estimated 60,000-tons, 40 feet underwater in the Sea of Galilee. And archaeologists have no idea what it is. Based on the build up of sediment, it is between 2,000 and 12,000 years old, which is too wide a range to help identify it. It’s not even clear if the structure was built on land when the sea levels were lower, or if it was constructed underwater. The structure was located in 2003 by sonar scan. Now ten years later, researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority are mounted an expedition to attempt to learn more about the unexpected mound of boulders, which they speculate could have been a burial site, a place of worship or even a fish nursery.
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For the last 30 years, New York has welcomed ships and crews from the US Navy and Coast Guard to the harbor around the Memorial Day weekend during a celebration of 
All the reporting on this story talks about a “ghost ship” for sale by auction in Newburyport, MA. 