“Buckets of bullets”
There’s a recent addition to the blog roll, Running the Blockade: A Civil War Naval Blog, which shows a lot of promise. It’s written by a blogger who goes by the handle RoadDog, and I’m happy because it’s based in part on findings of archaeological work done on such ships. Right now, RoadDog is dealing with the wreck of Modern Greece, wrecked off Fort Fisher in June 1862. The shipwreck was discovers a century later, and became one of the first — I think the first — vessel of its type investigated using the then-novel discipline of nautical archaeology.
Here, RoadDog describes one young man’s first encounter with the ship and its history, lying practically in his own back yard:
Stan Register was 13, fifty years ago, and worked at a hot dog stand on the beach when the Navy divers showed up. They were staying at a hotel across from his stand and one day they invited him to come out to the barge and watch. He can remember seeing the outline of the wreck below the barge. That day they brought up a small cannon and banded cases of rifles along with four buckets of bullets and let him keep a couple.
As can be seen in the image above, from “buckets of bullets” was not an exaggeration.
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Image from Leslie S. Bright, The Blockade Runner Modern Greece, and Her Cargo.
Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog 
Glad to know about this blog. It does look interesting and I’m giving it a try. For details of blockade running I’ve recently been carefully studying Entrepot by Webster. It is very well footnoted and I’ve been tracking down a some of the documents and references. Very profitable research for me anyway and for my continuing work on the Denbigh. There are a lot of fun insights in the detailed import records when you can find them.