The crew of the Tarpon Springs-based Aqua Quest International has returned to salvage work for the first time since spending seven weeks in a Honduran prison over the summer.

This time, the crew is nowhere near Honduras.

"We’re salvaging a shipwreck that sunk in 1924 carrying a valuable cargo of high grade copper ore," Capt. Robert Mayne said. "It was coming from Cuba en route to Philadelphia and it got caught ... in a hurricane off of Cape Fear, North Carolina."

It's much friendlier waters for the Aqua Quest crew, who were arrested on May 2, in Honduras after pulling into port to begin recovering mahogany logs from a river bed. The six-man crew faced weapons charges that were later dropped after the U.S. State Department pressured the Honduran government. Mayne said they carried the guns for protection at sea.

The captain said his family is happy about where their project is located.

"They’re thrilled that we’re back in the U.S., thrilled that we’re working," he said. "They used to worry about 120 feet deep, sharks and stuff, but they go, 'no, this is a lot better.' "

Mayne and his crew are working about 42-miles off the North Carolina coast. They engineered a special vacuum to suck the copper ore off the ocean bottom that they nicknamed the 'ore-asaurus.'

"It's a huge 10-inch vacuum cleaner, if you will, that pulls these rocks from 120 feet down on the ocean floor up through a tube up onto the deck of the Aqua Quest," he said. "We just pour the rocks and the water into the cofferdam."

Mayne estimates the high-grade copper ore is worth several million dollars. Aqua Quest filed a claim in Admiralty court and has the legal title to the valuable cargo, according to Mayne.

"We have several interested buyers. It’s extremely rare," he said. "Today, high-grade copper ore would yield about 6 percent, and this yields 30 percent copper. It’s a real novelty.”

Mayne said there's also traces of gold and silver in the copper ore. The captain estimates there's at least 2,000 to possibly 4,000 tons of ore at the shipwreck site.

The crew was sucking up the copper ore last Saturday but had to temporarily stop to wait for some bad weather to clear. Mayne said the project should take 60 days to complete and then they'll likely head back to the country where they were imprisoned.

"We still plan to go back to Honduras. We’re going to do it very carefully," he said. "We’ll have all of our political parties in alignment."