FatCat:
What, if anything, have you found and salvaged on your dives? I'm not talking about scavenging wrecks, I'm just curious to know what items, if any, all of you have stumbled upon while diving.
I have seen this thread and read some of the posts along the way, but other than a lot of junk like golf balls, quarters, pennies, tokens, boat ladders, ect.,ect, I really didn't have much to add. We all find similar stuff just because we dive.
The story I am about to tell is true and fun but, as much as I would like to have found this item, I only helped search for it. sob,sob. I will try to tell the shorter version here.
I was doing some work (diving) in the Allegheny River in PA with some other folks that took us a couple weeks to complete.
Just a day or so into the second week a lady stopped by and said she owned a business near by and that a couple years back she had been robbed. She said she had heard rumors that her safe, which naturally was taken by the robbers, had been thrown off the bridge that we happen to be working under. She wanted to know if we could keep an eye out for it.
Well we were getting close to finishing our work and had nearly covered the entire, underwater, span of the bridge.
Well we all had a good laugh about it and figured that we weren't going to find any safe. There were several bouys in the area that were all held in place by small square concrete anchors about 2 1/2' square. We all saw several of these and naturally we explored them to see if maybe they were a safe as many of them were no longer attached to bouys.
On the next to last day we were there one of my co-workers found and checked out one and decided it was just another concrete block. The next day another co-worker found the same block but discovered that this block was made of metal. You guessed it it was the safe.
The door and thus the dial was lying face down against the substrate and so was not immediately recognized during the first inspection.
It had obviously been hammered on, pried on, and generally beat to death but it was still closed and locked. So naturally it was turned over to the state police and of course the business owner was notified.
I tell you it was pretty exciting finding that safe.
