The Press-Register has an article on the raising of the ship captained by Jimmy Buffett’s grandfather: "Work halted on Buffett shipwreck"
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on Thursday ordered a condo developer to stop digging up the sunken remains of a four-masted schooner once captained by the grandfather of singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett.
The decaying wooden hulk is that of the Chiquimula, a longtime Mobile Bay-area landmark, which was commanded for many years by Capt. James Buffett, a highly regarded Gulf Coast master mariner.
State records show the vessel at the excavation site by the shore of Blakeley River is in fact Capt. James Buffett’s 176-foot Chiquimula.
The Chiquimula was a Mobile area landmark for nearly 13 years at the east end of the Bay Bridge Causeway before vandals burned it to the water line in 1953, according to Press-Register reports at the time.
In his book "A Pirate Looks at Fifty," Buffett wrote that in the years before World War II, his grandfather plied the waters of the Caribbean as skipper of a five-masted barkentine named the Chicamauga — apparently a misspelling of the name Chiquimula.
In his song "False Echoes," Buffett sings that: Now the old Chicamauga has slipped by the ways, She lies on the bottom of old Mobile Bay.
Read the entire article here