By Greta Gaffin — Correspondent
As the tale goes, Captain William Kidd buried a fortune of pirate booty before his 1701 capture and execution. One legend has Kidd’s men asking a farmer for tools to bury treasure along the banks of the Assabet River; in exchange, they gave the farmer a hatful of gold coins.
Liam McCarthy was fascinated by these stories and spent his West Concord boyhood hoping for a glimpse of gold.
“I spent so long walking up and down the banks of the Assabet, and when I got older, I got a metal detector and a kayak,” McCarthy said.
That tracks with his childhood interests.
“Growing up, I watched a lot of ‘Jonathan Bird’s Blue World’ on the Nature Channel, and he dives in a lot of places, and that’s what got me interested in marine stuff,” he said. “I was fascinated by the divers at the aquarium as a kid.”

Treasure hunt
The Assabet isn’t the only local place where there might be treasure.
“Another story I found more recently talked about how some of Kidd’s men tried to flee across White Pond in a rowboat,” McCarthy said. “It either sank, or they had to throw the treasure overboard to get away.”
Though McCarthy hasn’t found any doubloons — yet — he did make a discovery at White Pond.
He had heard a story about a fiberglass rowboat, the Magnolia Maeflower, at the bottom of the pond. He and a friend swam down to look, but because it’s 20 feet underwater, they could stay only briefly.
Once he became scuba certified after his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he’s studying civil and environmental engineering, he went back for a better look at the rowboat.

There was nothing particularly interesting about it by itself, McCarthy said, but he likes to think of it as the first shipwreck he’s dived on.
Recently, McCarthy brought a friend to show off his first find. White Pond gets deep fairly quickly — this summer, heavy rains raised the water levels — and the bottom is extremely silty.
“It’s so dark and murky, you can see maybe a foot. I couldn’t tell the difference between water and silt,” he said. “The dive computer went black because I’d started sinking into silt — we couldn’t even see each other.”
That’s when they stumbled upon another rowboat. It wasn’t fiberglass; it was wood.
Could that be the missing pirate rowboat? McCarthy can’t say for sure, but he hopes so.
Doing the research
Last summer, McCarthy experienced a new kind of diving — research diving — at the University of Massachusetts Gloucester Marine Station.
“It’s called science diving, and the science part comes first,” he said.
There are more rules to science diving than recreational diving, and they were there to study the black sea bass and its respiration. It’s done with an underwater aquarium, where the fish are placed in a respirometry chamber and the amount of consumed oxygen is measured.
The problem: The UMass team couldn’t find any black sea bass, which prompted some team members to get up early to go down to Buzzards Bay. Meanwhile, McCarthy and some other divers went off in search of lost traps they’d offered to retrieve for a lobsterman. They dived off a different side of the marine station from where the researchers previously had. Suddenly, out of cracks in the marine station wall, they begin to see black fish.
“We started fishing with children’s fishing rods, and one of my friends caught one on his very first cast,” he said.
The black sea bass had been there all along. The other researchers who’d gotten up at 3 a.m. to search elsewhere weren’t very happy about that.

An underwater future
McCarthy hopes to do more professional diving — and more diving on shipwrecks that are a little more interesting than rowboats. He also enjoys building his own dive gear, which he attributes to his exposure to building tech items with the robotics club at Concord-Carlisle High School, from which McCarthy graduated in 2021.
“The only way to get better at diving is to dive,” he said. “Get to know divers who’ve been diving for a long time. Learn from the people who spend so much of their time diving.” Diving can be a risky activity, and a mistake could lead to decompression sickness or death.
On this, McCarthy quoted Edd Sorenson, a world-renowned cave diver whose technical diving classes McCarthy took in Florida: “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.”
