I forgot to mention one final thought.  It could be offshore Cape Canaveral, the other final frontier besides the sea.  With navigation connected to stars and many of the ships seem to carry the same name as the shuttle and Nasa program it was my strongest east coast USA guess.  I also think the Disney ship leaves from there for the new route they have for Europe with the first stop in Spain.

If that is the case I go with Tupai as choice one in the Boro Boro atoll or my fav as choice 2 Vanuatu and runner up Christmas Island

I could not agree with you more. I had to change my shift with a fellow employee then go in early (1hour) so I could work on the puzzle which netted me a total of 30 minutes to work on the "final answer" before I had to give it up and go to work. 10 am on a week day was very unfair to all of us working class treasure hunters.

Any time chosen was going to be bad for somebody somewhere.  Fact of life.  By keeping the time about the same for each challenge at least we knew about when it would start each time after the first couple anyway.  I'm just thankful I didn't have to get up at 3 am.  Then again maybe that would have given me better odds!!!  I just hope they do it again next year.  Good Luck to all the qualifiers and don't forget to make a donation to the site that helped you win! 

I don't know if anyone has posted this or not, but I came up with a different solution for the barrel part of the puzzle.  To me it resembled the 5_1 bouy the most, so I took it to mean either 6 (5+1) or 4 (the number inbetween the 5 and 1 in the final solve for that puzzle, this would also cover 5-1=4).  I ended up going with 6 for my "bouy" number.  All the other numbers followed similar logic already mentioned in other posts.

 I can't wait for the answer to post.

I realize this is not the correct final answer, but it was my answer:

Using the pirate map I found a match with the series of numbers in lower left corner of the map and the left to right sequence of the lamps/bottles/bouy in the puzzle.

 The puzzle goes _ 5 4 _ 3 2 _ _

The map goes    3 5 4 6 3 2 2 8

check it out in this picture I created (with a little help from pro's web site)

http://picasaweb.google.com/DecodeMeNow/UntitledAlbum/photo#5070870132178117266

Yes, but would your boss give you time off if you had won?

311S, 17541E Might be: 31 11N,75 41W But then, that would put us back where we started...

 

looks as if the treasure was sunk near the Hawaiian islands. Congrats to the final winner!

 

I can to the same answer as your wife - the bottles are floating - therefore they're empty - therefore 0.

There were too many LOGICAL answers for this one! 

 

 Try 31.10N by 17.541W - International waters off Africa, about a day's cruise from Gibraltar.