Ship believed to be Caledonia will remain on the bottom of Lake Erie
- Thread starter Green_Manelishi
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
That's bull on so many levels. That wreck has no right to be on the historic register if they don't even know what the darn thing is. Second if a salvager brought up artifacts from the site, then he can legally arrest the wreck. Archeologists have thousands of examples of this type of vessel and have no right to declare it historic. Notice how after all the work is put in to finding these wrecks, that the govt says no to salvage and claims it is theirs when they wouldn't have even known this wreck was there if not discovered. Now I do know that like the Alvin Clark that this would rot away eventually if not preserved, but time and nature determines what happens to the wrecks, not the government.
What I do not understand is that if the court ruled that it was indeed abandoned then under admiralty law you have the right to recover an artifact and seize the vessel as your property. Admiralty law is still on the books and state law does not supercede it. Even in Michigan when the feds turned over the rights of the bottom lands back to Michigan ownership they did not really have the right to do this legally. The feds should have changed the admiralty law or abolished it first. If you had the money to fight this all the way to the supreme court you should win. Remember Mel Fisher and the state of Florida. The state wanted Mel to find the treasure and then give it all to them. Mel fought this to the supreme court and won it all because of the admiralty law. Even though I personally think the ship should remain on the bottom admiralty law should still rule the day.
Well the Atocha ended up being outside Florida's jurisdiction by a margin. Examples can be made from the Paul Ehorn, Gary Kozak, and Harry Zych. The Roscinco was only lost because Paul ran out of funds to pursue Wisconsin out of ownership of the wreck. He should have hired David Haywood on this.
Paul won his case here in Michigan because of the word embedded. I am not sure if anyone has pursued the state laws all the way to the supreme court. Also remember the feds wanted Mel Fishers treasures also. The court ruled that it all belonged to Fisher.
Similar threads
