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YOU'RE HISTORY
LOUISE TREWAVAS
I'm hanging on the shotline, about to bag off. I've unfurled my SMB and locked my reel in free-running mode, but now the crack-bottle is proving awkward and requires two hands.
That's sorted it! I watch the bag fly off to the surface and I'm left with nothing but a piece of string running through my fingers. I glance down with horror and see my reel merrily unspooling its way down the shot.
I'm anticipating a "doink! doink! doink!" sound as the metal reel bounces off the unsuspecting divers on the line below me but fortunately it misses them all. I wave pathetically at the upturned faces. Well, that's one way to make an impression!
I'm so embarrassed that I'm praying for a basking shark to come by and swallow me up. But, as if by magic, I see that one of the divers has retrieved my errant reel and is winding it in as he comes up the shot.
What a total hero! If I didn't have an hour of deco to endure, I'd have whipped out my mouthpiece and snogged his face off there and then.
Some divers are just dead handy when it comes to picking stuff up and retrieving lost objects. This is a gift that should be celebrated and appreciated, not villified.
Diving is full of adventurous individuals who like to explore and discover stuff. The problem is that if you retrieve something really sexy and interesting, it will get taken off you. If you discover a really fabulous wreck or site, chances are that diving it will be banned.
Take the divers from Finland who put considerable effort into finding and identifying the Vrouw Maria, an 18th century Dutch merchant ship believed to have been carrying works of art bought by Russian Tsarina Catherine. Finland's National Board of Antiquities has gone to court to seize control of the wreck and stop the divers from diving it. The divers get nothing, and the Board of Antiquities get... nothing either. They have no funds and no plans to survey the wreck or recover anything.
Archaebloodyologists - what are they like? Rancid old men who would rather leave artefacts to rot away than risk losing control of their precious site, that's what they're like!
The latest TV offering on the subject, Extreme Archaeology, would have us believe that the typical modern archaeologist is a strapping, muscle-bound twenty-something who will launch himself off a cliff and abseil across rivers in pursuit of something thrilling and archaeological. Which is a contradiction in terms, as well as being total nonsense.
Now, if those trowel-botherers had been after a bag of gold coins or an ancient jewelled dagger, I might understand. But how can you get your knickers in a twist about whether a submerged fragment of smelly old timber was once part of a Roman bridge?
Face it guys, anybody who gets more excited about carbon-dating than human dating has to be dull as ditchwater.
And how much duller could you get than arguing that there is some intrinsic value in preserving the "purity" of a site by banning everybody from visiting it! The truth is that stuff left on the seabed is of no particular benefit to anybody, and sooner or later it will disappear into oblivion.
Unless there are moral grounds to leave well alone - such as respect for the memory of people who died, and the feelings of their relatives - then why shouldn't divers recover artefacts so that they can be left to rot in their back gardens? Whoops, sorry, I meant so that they can be lovingly restored and appreciated.
Well, maybe I'm being harsh on archaeologists. Perhaps the idea that age adds value could be tempting; after all, none of us is getting any younger. And, of course, there are certainly more than a few old wrecks around deserving of a designation.
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