Coolest/Most Unique "Finds" While Diving?

[SlugLife]

I bring them all home and plant them in my anchor garden. I probably have over 30 growing out there. Someday when I sell this house, somebody is going to be very very confused.

My dive-buddy and I drop anchors off at a tree on a piece of land he owns nearby, and call it "the anchor tree."

As I understand it from CSI: Special Victims, a couple of days in the water is enough to degrade the fingerprints & DNA traces; after that: who cares.

Or simply dropping it has a significantly less probability of being seen/drawing attention....

Drop it in one of those portable toilets instead.

 

[Still Kicking]

True. The Danforth style anchors aren’t really worth much. But a good plow can bring in a few bucks. The current plow on the bow of my boat was a good find. I had actually had my chain splice unravel a couple days before, and lost my galvanized plow. Good thing I had two extra anchors on the boat.

We dove the spot I thought it was, but we were unable to find it. Just when we had about given up the search, we spotted what could be my anchor. Found the chain, and followed it to a plow. This one was bigger, and had some growth, so was certainly down for more than a couple days. We were low on gas, so tied a line and sent up a marker. Repositioned the boat, swapped to another tank and went down to retrieve it. When I got it up, and sprayed it a bit, I realized it was stainless. Decent upgrade. Oh, and that galvanized plow I lost was one I found a few years back.

If it’s a good one, I’ll mark it, or retrieve it depending on how long I’ve been down. Fishing boats around here lose lots of anchors, so they’ll most likely sell.

Oh, forgot I pulled up a boat drive shaft a while back. Wasn’t diving, though. I managed to hook it with my anchor and pulled it up. Definitely glad I had a windlass that day, as pulling that up by hand would have sucked.

I find a lot of anchors and if they are decent, i will go to the effort of recovering them. I recovered a 30kg Bruce on a beach dive by lift bagging it and swimming it in to a pier, then hauling it up. On the swim to shore, I found a similar sized Delta plow with 200' of chain so i went back with a boat and picked that up later.

At up to $6/foot new, a length of good clean chain can be worth a lot more than the anchor.

I was on a tear last year and found four or five decent anchors in the 15-30kg range with collectively about 1,000 feet of chain. I clean them and post on Craigslist. It takes a while but they eventually sell - sooner later one of the commercial boats will lose a hook and give me a call.

 

[MaxBottomtime]

Another interesting find was a brass gas tank from a British Seagull outboard motor. It was green and had been underwater for a lot of years. When I opened it, it was still full of gas. I cleaned it and gave it to a collector.

I found the photo of the find.

 

[vespers_]

I found a road once. Turns out there was a whole town too. They flooded the area to create a channel for ships to pass through.

 

[Fin Finder]

Cat in a bag.

 

[bakodiver391]

Not my coolest find but just found a pair of WW2 B24 propellers and some random bits while doing survey work in southern Tarawa, Kiribati. No sign of the engines or the rest of the airplane but I was there to work, not explore. My friend who is a WW2 historian says there is no record of a B24 loss near that location nor was there a repair facility that might have dumped them. He will continue the archive search to try to identify the loss.

 

[Scott G. Bonser]

On one of our dive club ‘artifact dives’ in search of colonial era bottles I dove in pitch black water and ‘hand searched’ the channel of Newmarket Creek in Hampton, Virginia and thought I found a medium-sized soup or salad bowl. I stuffed it in my mesh goodie-bag and found it to be a very old electric insulator from the late 1800s when I surfaced with it. It was made by Columbia Glass works of Lynchburg, VA. Now I need to find it amongst my artifact collection. ( ..where did i HIDE that thing?? ..)

 

[Scott G. Bonser]

1. Cat in a bag.

   Hmmmmmm, doesn’t sound very appetizing

 

[ZamaTim]

Great topic and lots of great finds with the posts here. As for myself, I guess the most interesting find is when I was the XO on a NOAA ship doing debris clean up at the Pearl & Hermes Atoll in the North Western Hawaiian Islands when we found a Tomahawk cruise missile with parachute in less than twenty feet of water. The Tomahawk was in excellent condition, with a large coral formation growing right on top in the middle.

We talked about trying to retrieve it intact and taking it back to the NOAA building in Honolulu, but we were unsure if it had a warhead or not. We were able to get numbers off it, and later the US Navy identified it as a test flight lost about 20 years earlier. The missile still sits there today, as far as I know. I do have a photo of it, but have not come across it yet.

There have been some great finds at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, where I've spent a fair amount of time diving around Fort Island, but those stories are for another time. PS: the photo I use in ScubaBoard is me standing next to the USS Arizona (BB-39) between dives.

 

[BoundForElsewhere]

Cat in a bag.

Did you let it out?