It all started with a pile of coins.
Twenty years ago, Sydney surfer Leigh was snorkelling at Bondi Beach when he noticed a number of coins lying on the bottom of the sea floor.
“I thought, ‘wow, what are these coins doing here?’ I dusted some sand away and saw there were more coins. I thought ‘gosh I’ve got to get a metal detector or something’. Famous last words,” he told news.com.au.
Instantly hooked, Leigh has spent the last 15 years searching the world’s canals and fields for treasure, adding to his bounty of jewellery, money, weapons, motorbikes and more.
“I used to be a surfer chasing perfect waves around the world. Now I chase treasure around the world,” said Leigh, who shares his finds on social media under the moniker the ‘Bondi Treasure Hunter’.
Two weeks ago, the solar panel salesman-turned treasure hunter struck big when he found a safe belonging to a member of a royal family.
Leigh was out with friends magnet finishing – whereby a magnet attached to a rope is thrown into water to retrieve items – at an undisclosed location overseas when he made the discovery.
“It was definitely a shock,” the 42-year-old recalled.
After hurling up the safe and busting it open, he found a collection of foreign passports, documents, keys, empty jewellery boxes and other personal items.
“We Googled the name on the passport and found out it belonged to a royal family”.
Leigh, who can’t disclose which royal family the safe belonged to due to an ongoing police investigation, said he ended up tracking down the owner on social media to return the personal items.
“I called him on Facebook … and asked ‘are you a member of the royal family?’ and they said ‘yes’. So that was a big shock.”
“I think I said ‘so I found the Crown Jewels.’ And we both had a laugh.”
Thousands of dollars worth of treasures
It was just one of hundreds of safes Leigh has found in canals around the world, some of which had been looted and dumped by criminals.
What lies inside is always a mystery, some contain credit cards, car keys, coins, and guns, while others are simply empty.
“In one safe we found a coin collection with a big silver coin from the 1700s,” said Leigh.
Another time, he came across a safe so large he had to hire a crane to pull it out of a canal in Amsterdam, where he currently lives.
Inside was a collection of memorial coins which Leigh handed over to police.
“After a year they weren’t collected so we got to keep them.”
Leigh’s most valuable find has been $5,000 worth of jewellery collected from Croatia, France, Italy, Australia, the Netherlands. His entire haul – which consists of thousands of items, including guns from the 1800s, knives from the 1600s, cannon balls, as well as modern items including motorbikes, phones and GoPros, is worth tens of thousands of dollars.
However, Leigh doesn’t sell his treasure, his favourite of which is a Rose Noble gold coin from the 1600s.
Instead, he earns his money through social media and keeps his finds for his own collection, gives them away, or holds onto it in the hopes he’ll be able to return items to their rightful owner.
Helping police
During his 15 years as a treasure hunter, Leigh has helped locate guns and knives suspected of being used in crimes.
“If we find a gun, we pull it out and we keep it in the same water that we found it and the police will come and they can do DNA testing on it … They’re really happy to hear from us when these things happen.”
When magnet fishing in Gouda, a Dutch city 60km south of Amsterdam, Leigh came across a stolen police alarm pistol.
“The police officer told us that criminals convert the gun to fire real bullets. And when you do that, it’ll only fire two or three real bullets before it jams. He showed us that the bullet was still lodged in there.
“So this gun was thrown into the canal because it had been fired a couple of times and jammed.”
Like other guns he’s found, the police pistol was taken away for fingerprinting and testing.
Leigh doesn’t hear back if his finds have helped solved a crime, but he says “criminals will be thinking twice these days about where they dump their evidence”.
As for whether he’s concerned criminals will find him fishing out evidence, Leigh says he’s not too worried. But there was one time he did have a close call.
“I was diving in a river in Switzerland and we found this giant box of ammunition and it was all brand new. It looked like it had been placed in the canal,” he explained.
“When we pulled it out of the water and turned around, there was one of those trail cameras pointing right at us and I thought the criminals have my face.”
However, when police were called to investigate the ammunition, they found the camera was actually monitoring beavers in the area.
“I could sleep at night,” Leigh joked.
Having found his dream job, the 42-year-old isn’t looking back and has a clear message for anyone looking to get involved – “There is treasure waiting just go out there and search.”
“You’re probably going to be surprised at what you find. You’ll have lots of adventures, you can clean the canals and learn a bit of history. Definitely give it a go, treasure hunting is awesome.”