As you spend your days in a bean bag, sucking back soft drink and those super hot CC's (man those are so good) following Nathan Drake through adventures tracking the movements of his exploring (and apparently pirating and slaving) ancestor Sir Francis Drake, spare a thought for the people who are actually out following the path of Drake.

A research team led by a man named James Sinclair had a big win this week, uncovering the remains of two of Francis Drake’s lost ships, the Elizabeth and the Delight, in Panama.

James Sinclair, a Marine Archaeologist, lacks the movie star looks and mercenary shoot out credentials of Nathan Drake, but if you were looking for a real life version of the video game character look no further. Sinclair is the kind of guy who skipped out on the international Convention on the Preservation of Underwater Cultural Heritage with colleague David Concannon to go and find the world’s oldest recorded shipwreck. Where was it? Submerged below 16,000 feet of water in the Bermuda Triangle.

That’s right, he finds wrecks in the Bermuda Triangle.

His latest find of the two scuttled Drake vessels in Panama puts to rest decades of speculation as to their location. Sinclair and his team believe they are also close to locating Drake’s long unknown final resting place.

Modern treasure hunting is a funny business. It’s almost exclusively maritime based, searching for wrecks and sunken ships, and there are few hard and fast international laws managing the process. Unlike video games, where the entire operation is handled by a square jawed alpha male, a plucky attractive journalist and a wise cracking old guy, the actual treasure hunter is usually just a rich guy or a museum organisation who has stumbled on some information and hires someone like James Sinclair to put together a team and go in and see what he can find.

Francis Drake: Chick magnet, pirate, badass... and okay yes, very likely professional slaver

Most of the work is carried out with sonar equipment and deep sea Remote Operated Vehicles (ROVs). This was the case with the wrecks of the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank off the Florida coast in 1622 carrying at least 35 tons of silver and 161 pieces of gold, and the Fantome, a British ship loaded with plunder looted from the Whitehouse in 1814, that wrecked on the Nova Scotia coast.

If you wanted to read more about James Sinclair and the type of work he has done you could do worse than his bio here: http://www.bwvkw.com/operations/SinclairBio.aspx

After reading it I’ve decided, when I grow up, I want to be a Marine Archaeologist. I just need to work up the courage to go snorkelling first.