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Christina Young wrote (in response to Keith Hadland): > 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. The only thing I think would be naive would be to believe that there is a way to persuade divers to leave wrecks alone. But I think you are naive if you believe that divers only take things from wrecks to preserve them. I know quite a few diving clubs whose only mission in diving a wreck is to rip as much brass off the wreck as possible and sell it to a scrap dealer to raise money for their club. In fact, I'd say that in my area the wrecks have almost been destroyed because the recovery has been so aggressive. People hiring barges to moor over wrecks and suck everything (life and all) up with suction pumps. A few years ago a couple of divers were arrested for removing a prop with explosives - not because they were taking the prop but because they didn't have permission from the police and they deafened a sonar listener at the submarine refit base. The reason they did it was for the money they'd get selling it as scrap. > > 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. I don't know how it is in the US but here I wouldn't be so sure. I think it is one thing to remove a bell or a binacle but systematically removing every piece of brass on the ship leaves others with nothing to look at. How many port holes do people need to collect. Perhaps it is one thing to get one and keep it as a showpiece but after that what is the point? > 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. That's an incredibly naive view. Life must surely be worth infinitely more than a piece of brass - and I'm not even a conservationist. > > 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. Personally, I can get many years of enjoyment out of diving a wreck if it still has a few features, even after 100 years of sea trashing. I've dived with people on this list who are into "artifact recovery" and I must admit I was impressed with the results after they were cleaned up, but I'm a wreck tourist and there is nothing worse than turning up to dive a wreck and find there is nothing left but a bland hull because all the interesting bits have been blasted or torn off. Alan alan@mi*.de*.co*.uk*
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