Searching the Oceans for Riches : Sunken ships: When not singing in nightclubs, Bill Warren is preparing for a dive he hopes will pay off big.

Bill Warren likes to think of himself as a modern-day Indiana Jones. He’s really a part-time nightclub singer who runs a sea urchin fishing boat off the Ventura County coast, but he is obsessed with the idea of finding sunken treasures.

For 15 years the 39-year-old Oxnard man has searched for ancient sunken ships. And he thinks that he has struck it rich.

Just a few miles off a deserted island in the Bahamas, Warren and a crew of divers have found a small ship that went down in the 1600s. Warren believes that the ship might be the Port Royal, a 120-foot British vessel.

On their first expedition, Warren and his crew found a human bone, a few coins, bottles, bullets, a bronze stake and several cannons near the ship’s wreckage.

Warren is waiting for a permit from the Bahamian government before he attempts to find out what else is hidden inside the broken ship. He hopes to head to the islands with several central coast divers and his 12-year-old son, Adam, sometime this summer to claim the ancient booty.

Since Warren was a child, he has been captivated by the idea that there are riches hidden deep beneath the sea.

“To think there are treasures waiting out there to be had,” Warren said. “When you find them, it’s like touching a piece of history.”

In 1976, Warren decided to begin his quest for the ocean’s fortune.

While Warren was working as a singer on a religious television program in Anchorage, he read books about old shipwrecks in his spare time. He came across the story of the Trinidad, a Spanish galleon that sunk in shallow water near Oceanside.

According to legend, the ship was carrying $11 million in Aztec gold.

With an Escondido building contractor as a partner and financial backer, Warren obtained a permit from the city of Oceanside to look for the Trinidad. The two towed a $7,000 underwater metal detector behind a small boat until they had located the remains of the ship. Only 25 feet of sand separated them from the Trinidad and its mythical treasure.

“I’m a modern-day Indiana Jones,” Warren told a San Diego television station at the time.

But Warren ran into trouble.

The state of California and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers told him that he would have to obtain an environmental impact report--at a cost of about $50,000--before he could begin the salvage operation. Also, he would have been required to give most of the ship’s treasure to the state.

Consequently, Warren decided to give up his quest for the historic galleon. He went to work as a singer in Las Vegas nightclubs and decided that he would search for sunken ships on the side.

“I was pulled between my musical career and the shipwrecks,” Warren said.

Two years ago he decided to again devote himself full time to the treasure hunt. He went to the state of Oregon and asked for a permit to exhume the legendary San Francisco Xavier, which sank in 1705 with a cargo of beeswax. In the years after the wreck, eight tons of wax had washed ashore.

Warren said Oregon state officials refused to allow him to touch the wreck.

“They called me a grave robber,” he said. “Some people think we’re pirates ourselves.”

Warren went back to singing and tried to forget about the sea.

But he decided to take up his quest again after a man living in the Bahamas called to tell him about the Port Royal shipwreck. Six months ago Warren moved his wife and four children to Oxnard, bought a boat and hired divers to catch sea urchins.

After he finishes the daily paperwork of the urchin business, he plans to make his trip to the Bahamas. He occasionally performs in Los Angeles area nightclubs, using the stage name Michael Valentino.

Warren said if he is able to salvage any treasure from the ship, he must share 25% of the findings with the Bahamian government. The rest will be his and the crew’s.

“We estimate there could be as much as a couple million dollars on the ship,” Warren said. “If it’s a pirate ship, it can hold even more. About $300 million was found on a pirate ship near Boston.”

But Warren says he is worried that another treasure hunter will salvage the vessel’s cargo before he does.

“I worry about it every day,” Warren said. “If someone beats me, they would be breaking the law by doing it. How would I know? I’m 3,000 miles away.”

Joe Barnett, a San Diego diver who went with Warren on the first expedition to the Bahamas, said he is anxious to get started on the project.

“Treasure hunting was just a dream at first,” Barnett said. “But we wanted to bridge that dream into a working reality.”