My nephew (who is 12 years old) pulled this out of the water last week at my father in law's place on Palm Beach.. They have established that it's some sort of old galleon wheel but not much more. The state is looking into it now.. If anyone here knows about this kinda stuff I'd be interested in hearing about it..
looks alot like an old shoe to me.. Oh you're talking about the circular thing around it.. You're right.. it does resemble a galleon wheel. In my free time I'm a registered PADI IDC staff instructor and give drift and deep diving adventure dives to folks with open water licenses who are trying to advance to 'adanced' and 'rescue' licenses. I do it more for the joy of diving than the pennies I make doing it in my free time. I'm more into wrecks than reefs and fish and visited the Thistlegorm last month in the red sea... Now that was a real wreck! It's hard to determine how old that thing is based on a picture, but the corral growth around it hints that it might be anywhere from 25-30 years old depending on different factors such as the salt in the water and temperature and how deep it was when you found it. I'm assuming your 12 year old nephew probably didn't have dive more than 15-20 feet to find this, so it might just be a wooden wheel which some folks assemble on the sides of the boats just for looks, and it probably fell of the side of some unfortunate dude's boat back in the 70's or 80's and left to rot underwater. I might not be Jack Sparrow, but weren't old galleon wheels made of wood and iron? If it was a genuine galleon wheel and was old enough for the iron to rot off, the wood should have been much thicker due to 150-200 years of corral growth around it. IDK.. keep us posted.
I kind of thought it looked like a night light to me. I'm actually pretty sure now that it is a night light.