A pair of amateur divers from Dalhousie found scattered chunks of old wood that could be the remnants of a wharf or a shipwreck, according to archaeologists.

Last summer Mario Carrier and Serge Robichaud took up scuba diving and snorkelling. They were swimming near the mouth of the Bathurst harbour when they spotted some wood in the sand.

When the men cleared away the sand, they found wood timbers in an area 30 metres long.

'We always want to find a treasure ... and we were hoping that it was a ship.'—Mario Carrier

They told the province about their find last year. Provincial officials visited the site once but it was too covered in sand. The men cleared more away, and provincial archaeologist Brent Suttie is now trying to determine what the wood structure was.

"At this point we know nothing about it, other than the fact that it's either a wharf structure or a shipwreck," he said. "What we've been doing is looking at old maps to try to pinpoint what could possibly be in that area."

Suttie said he'll know for sure when he and a team of divers take a closer look at the site in the next few weeks. In the meantime, he's researching the history of shipwrecks in the area.

"I've got a list of shipwrecks in the area that we don't know the exact locations of," he said. "I'm trying to get the particulars on each of those wrecks: when it went down, the size of it, what kind of ship it was. By knowing those it kind of narrrows down the kind of features that we can look for on this object if it turns out to be a wreck."

Carrier said the discovery is like something out a children's book.

"We always want to find a treasure and stuff like that," he said, "and we were hoping that it was a ship."