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Hadland Keith (is this right, or is it Keith Hadland?) wrote:

> John Heimann wrote:

>>Hank Garvin came up with a porthole and I brought up a cage lamp, but none 
>>of
>>the really serious artifacts have come up yet.

> Now I don't want to flame anyone, but here we have a wreck which has hardly 
> been dived and  which is out of range of most  divers, so why do we feel a 
> need to take 'artifacts' from it?

Do you really think these artifacts will be there forever?  These wrecks
have a great tendency to collapse and be lost to the sea after years in
salt water.

> I know this may sound like some sort of 60s hippy ideal, but I get 
> extremely annoyed by some divers I know of who will rip porthole after 
> porthole off a wreck only to leave them rotting in their back garden.

This doesn't sound like a hippy ideal.  It sounds like a very naive and
uninformed individual.  Portholes don't "rot in the back garden".  Even
if they are left there, they will survive much better than in the sea.
Divers I know (which are probably pretty typical of most wreck divers /
artifact recoverers) take great pains to restore and preserve their
artifacts.  Go to any East Coast dive show.  You will see some of these on
display.

> Some 
> guys go down tooled up for destruction rather than exploration - chisels, 
> air tools, hacksaws, hammers - not only do these prevent other people from 
> seeing the wreck as it should be ...

These are not tools of destruction.  They are tools of artifact recovery
(read artifact salvation).  How "should the wreck be"?  A pile of hull
plates laying in the sand after years of being eaten and beaten by the sea?

> they also disturb all of the life that's 
> built up on these wrecks in the years they've been down there.

This life (sea anemones, muscels) has a relatively short life span.  Are a
few anemones worth saving over a porthole?  The wrecks are covered with these
things anyway.

> We've already trashed everything in 'normal' air range - do we really have 
> to do the same to the new deeper wrecks?

The sea has done far more trashing than us.

Regards,

Christina

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