fire_diver
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jamiemac:
Don't worry, I wont step foot in, or spend one dime in YOUR country.
portholes
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Don't worry, I wont step foot in, or spend one dime in YOUR country.
I would be interested in learning more about these said 'virgin' wrecks (don't care about their location),,just about he nature of your find...???
JEScholz
Contributor
OK,I am over the excitement of a virgn wreck find. Now to the serious stuff, for me it depends what and where the wreck is. I started diving off the NJ coast where many of the "wrecks" are more like underwater junk yards, blasted apart by the corps of engineers or WWII sub chasers. Now I dive in Michigan where the state claims ownership to anything on the bottomlands and can confiscate you gear, boat and anything else they have a whim to take if you "steal" from "THEIR wrecks".
To me one of the big deciding factors is the overall conditon of the wreck. I would not take a thing off the F.T. Barney, including what I find in the sand, but if I find a port hole or dead eye on the Havana, It will be recovered, preserved and displayed for non-divers to also enjoy. (The F.T. Barney is fully intact in 160' with lots of loose items in and around the wreck. The desire of the finding divers is to preserve it as it was found. The Havana is nothing but a few dozen hull ribs, covered with zebra muscles in 60' of water with constantly sifting sand.)
*Footnote to the OLD PIRATE, Don't have a heart attack, we still support the S.W.M.U.P. and If I find a dead eye on the Havana, it will end up at the S.H. Maritime Museum.
How do other divers feel about when is it OK and when is it not? There have been an lot of comment about taking things off the "Big O" in Florida, but after seeing the video of the sinking and how that hulk was stripped before it was sunk, my oppinion has changed.
To me one of the big deciding factors is the overall conditon of the wreck. I would not take a thing off the F.T. Barney, including what I find in the sand, but if I find a port hole or dead eye on the Havana, It will be recovered, preserved and displayed for non-divers to also enjoy. (The F.T. Barney is fully intact in 160' with lots of loose items in and around the wreck. The desire of the finding divers is to preserve it as it was found. The Havana is nothing but a few dozen hull ribs, covered with zebra muscles in 60' of water with constantly sifting sand.)
*Footnote to the OLD PIRATE, Don't have a heart attack, we still support the S.W.M.U.P. and If I find a dead eye on the Havana, it will end up at the S.H. Maritime Museum.
How do other divers feel about when is it OK and when is it not? There have been an lot of comment about taking things off the "Big O" in Florida, but after seeing the video of the sinking and how that hulk was stripped before it was sunk, my oppinion has changed.
Betail:
I am not a souv. diver.....the call is a personnal one outside the limits of 'law' as is found in much of the popular dive sites on The Lakes.....and these protected sites are a good thing. Artificial reefs such as the Big O are prepped in most cases by removing all items prior to sinking. Diving true shipwreck sites are a differnt bag when it comes to artifacts.....I am on the side of leave the site as is for the preservation of the wreck,,,,let conservation teams/groups remove those articles deemed ness. for public display in the proper format as prescribed in methods set down for underwater archeology. The problem in the past is that so many real wreck sites were picked clean of the historic and maritine value....we as sport divers are there to protect the sites new and old from plunder. Just my .02
fire_diver
Contributor
OK, then lets look at a real shipwreck. The Andrea Doria. The very first item recovered was the ships binnacle. A few years later, the entire bridge had rotted and dissapeared into the sands below the wreck. During first couple decades of dives, divers pulled hundreds, if not thousands of items from the ship. From what I have heard, the ship isn't even stable enough to penetrate anymore. Entire decks have begun sliding off into a pile of debris. If the original items weren't recoverd when they were recovered, they would have been lost forever. Many of the recovered items do sit in a musuem today, so they aren't "just sitting in some diver's garage" as many recovery opponents like to claim.
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jamiemac:
6 hours from tao right j? wouldnt like to swim it either.
JEScholz
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Do you encourage taking souveniers off of the wrecks?
if it's a wargrave , absolutely not a thing.
On other wrecks sometimes we need to surface something to i.d.the wreck, bottles, plates are useful.
i like to leave telegraphs etc in place - it's good for business too, divers like to see them. dropped off portholes ok, but it's not nice to visit a wreck which has been obviously cut up by divers before.
if it's an ugly modern wreck in murky water which we're never going to visit again, no problem with me - if you can find anything worth having.
definately our WW2 wrecks are disintegrating into the sand,so i can see the point in raising artifacts before they're lost - but there's a difference between that and completely raping a wreck.
On other wrecks sometimes we need to surface something to i.d.the wreck, bottles, plates are useful.
i like to leave telegraphs etc in place - it's good for business too, divers like to see them. dropped off portholes ok, but it's not nice to visit a wreck which has been obviously cut up by divers before.
if it's an ugly modern wreck in murky water which we're never going to visit again, no problem with me - if you can find anything worth having.
definately our WW2 wrecks are disintegrating into the sand,so i can see the point in raising artifacts before they're lost - but there's a difference between that and completely raping a wreck.
LIVEABOARD and (so called) VIRGIN WRECK yeah I bet those things are still there
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