HOT NEWS !

By Catherine Kozak

Deep purple water with streaks of sparkling azure concealed a war grave 110 feet beneath the surface.

A vessel plying the waters off the Outer Banks on Saturday was hunting for what was once the hunter, a German submarine sunk 66 years ago by depth charges dropped by an American bomber.

Divers on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's new 41-foot catamaran were geared up and waiting to descend to survey the U-701, the most intact of discovered U-boats sunk off the North Carolina coast.

Boat captain Chad Smith, NOAA's East Coast vessel coordinator, slowed the catamaran's motor and circled the position above where the wreck lay mostly buried on the ocean floor about 22 miles off Avon.

 

From Naples News


They sound like treasure hunters. HammerHead. Fiberglass Bob. Caucasian Tim. And they talk like them, too. The grizzled salts and the young ones, too.

I believe the gold’s out there,” said Jake Wicburg, the 14-year-old son of Capt. Tim (not Caucasian Tim) Wicburg.

And is he going to be the one who finds it ? “Oh yeah,” he says.

The plane’s there and the gold’s there,” the elder Wicburg said. “I’ll be looking for it for the rest of my life.

When a young Timmie Wicburg snagged a piece of an airplane on a fish hook in 1990, he had heard the stories. So had his dad, the late Capt. Jim Wicburg.


Read more...

By Norman Hammond


Amphorae were the workaday containers of the ancient world, used to ship everything from aromatic wine to smelly fish sauce around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Thousands have been found, in shipwrecks and in fragments at their destinations. 

Over the years, certain assumptions have grown up as to what was shipped in particular forms of amphorae and from specific source areas, and the remains of pottery containers have stood proxy for their presumed contents’ significance in ancient economies.

In most cases no direct evidence of those contents could be obtained: long burial in the ground or on the seabed had, it was thought, washed away any evidence. 

A new study now shows that traces of ancient DNA can survive more than two millennia underwater.

These can be multiplied using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) established in forensic analysis to yield evidence of what the amphorae contained: sometimes the results are surprising.


Read more...

By Elliott Hester


Imagine you are diving beneath the surface of the Caribbean Sea.

A school of horse-eyed jacks suddenly changes direction, flashing what appears to be a silvery sheet. A shipwreck emerges in the deep blue distance. You head in that direction, cruising alongside a picturesque coral reef. 

In this underwater adventure, you're neither a snorkeler nor a diver. You're a passenger in an submarine. 

Since 1986, when Atlantis Submarines International Inc. launched the world's first public-passenger submarine off the coast of Grand Cayman Island in the British West Indies, more than 11 million customers have taken the plunge.

The voyages are now offered in 28-, 48- and 64-passenger subs at 12 island destinations in the Caribbean, Hawaii and Guam. 

I went under in Atlantis III, a 48-passenger sub operating off the coast of Barbados.

The journey began at the dock in Bridgetown, the capital. I boarded the Ocean Quest transfer boat for the 10-minute trip to the dive site at Freshwater Bay Reef, a mile off Paradise Beach on the west coast of the island.


Full story...

By Eithne Shortall


American entrepreneur Gregg Bemis finally gets courts go-ahead to explore the wreck off Ireland.

It is the best known shipwreck lying on the Irish seabed, but it is only today that the owner of the Lusitania will finally begin the first extensive visual documentation of the luxury liner that sank 93 years ago. 

Gregg Bemis, who bought the remains of the vessel for £1,000 from former partners in a diving business in 1968, has been granted an imaging license by the Department of the Environment.

This allows him to photograph and film the entire structure, and should allow him to produce the first high-resolution pictures of the historic vessel. 

The RMS Lusitania sank off the coast of Cork in May 1915 when a German U-boat torpedoed it. An undetermined second explosion is believed to have speeded its sinking, with 1,198 passengers and crew losing their lives.

By Alan Hustak


A replica of a 19th-century Hudson River canal class schooner is open to the public at the Old Port this weekend.

Unlike many of the graceful tall ships that often sail into the harbour, the Louis McClure is a stubby little blue-collar working boat.

It resembles boats that used to carry heavy cargo between Montreal and New York City down the Richelieu River, through Lake Champlain and along the Hudson River canal system.

"Think of them as a tractor-trailers with sails," said the Louis McClure's first mate, Erick Tichonuk. "Before the railways, they travelled the historic corridor between Trois Rivières, Montreal and New York City."

The boat arrived in Montreal from Quebec City on Thursday to raise awareness about Quebec and New England's shared maritime history.


Full article...

From PR-Inside


Archaeologists and scholars will excavate hundreds of fragments of an ancient Egyptian wooden boat entombed in an underground chamber next to Giza's Great Pyramid and try to reassemble the craft, Egyptologists announced Saturday.

The 4,500-year-old vessel is the sister ship of a similar boat removed in pieces from another pit in 1954 and painstakingly reconstructed.

Experts believe the boats were meant to ferry the pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid in the afterlife.

Starting Saturday, tourists were allowed to view images of the inside of the second boat pit from a camera inserted through the a hole in the chamber's limestone ceiling.

By McKibben Jackinsky


"You are helping write history today," shipwreck historian and dive team leader Steve Lloyd of Anchorage told a gathering of more than 130 people aboard the USCGC Hickory Monday afternoon.

The significance of the moment was not lost on representatives from the Pratt Museum, archaeologists, historians, researchers, teachers, writers, Coast Guardsmen and others surrounding a collection of items spread across the Hickory's deck.

Before them were pieces from the Torrent, a privately owned 141-foot, 641-ton ship, that sank after its oak hull crashed against the jagged rocks of Bird Reef the morning of July 15, 1868.

Just off Dangerous Cape, Bird Reef is in southern Cook Inlet, near Port Graham.