HOT NEWS !

By Diana Henderson - Daily Echo

Precious artefacts dating from the 17th century, pulled from a wreck off Poole Harbour, will be displayed at a free lecture. The Swash Channel Wreck, believed to date from the 1620s, is still revealing its treasures to divers from Bournemouth University. 

The lecture RMS Titanic: Protection, Preservation & Peril at the university focuses on the famous wreck of the Titanic and how best to preserve it for future generations.

It will be given by Ole Varmer, of the US based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and will concentrate on whether the liner is in “marine peril” and if preserving it in situ is the best solution to protect it. 

The lecture is organised by Paola Palma, lecturer programme leader for the university’s masters degree in Maritime Archaeology, who will speak about the Swash Channel Wreck.

Believed to be a high status ship, it lies in 7m of water, and was designated a Historic Wreck in December 2004.

Finds include at least six iron cannon, wooden barrels, rigging, copper, pewter, bones and apothecary jars and a rare wooden carving of a merman, which made headlines when it emerged from the deep in 2008.

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By João Medeiros - Wired.co.uk

This eerie wreck image is not computer generated. It's the sonar image of Russian nuclear submarine B-159 (called K-159 before decommissioning), which has been lying 248m down in the Barents Sea, between Norway and Russia, since 2003. The Russian Federation hired Adus, a Scottish company that specializes in high-resolution sonar surveying, to evaluate if it would be possible to recover the wreck.

"The operation was complicated as the submarine was very deep, so we had to use the sonar equipment mounted on a remotely operated vehicle, (below)" says Martin Dean, the managing director of Adus and a forensic-wreck archaeologist.

"We also had a problem with the surveying due to the density of north Atlantic cod attracted to the sound of the sonar and the light of the cameras. So at the beginning we had to turn off the equipment for 40 minutes and wait for the fish to go."

B-159, a November-class sub launched in 1963, was being towed to a shipyard in Snezhnogorsk, 1,000km north of St Petersburg, for scrapping when bad weather caused it to sink, killing nine crew.

"According to the sonar evidence, we can say that it sank stern first, headed down vertically and stuck 12m into the seabed, like a dart," says Dean.

"The hull then snapped at the aft end and crashed to the seabed, leaving about 8m of the outer casing, including the propellers, still buried vertically in the seabed. Surprisingly, the submarine is still in good condition for a salvage."

By Mary Ann Bragg - Cape Cod Times

The mighty British man-of-war HMS Somerset III, wrecked off Truro in 1778 during the Revolutionary War, received a high-technology treatment yesterday.

Land surveyors hired by the Cape Cod National Seashore created the first digital archive of the remaining visible timbers of the wreck using a three-dimensional laser scanner.

The surveyors also identified the wreck’s exact longitude and latitude measurements using global positioning, according to the Cape Cod Times. The idea is to create the first permanent digital archive of the wreck of a ship that played a critical role along the East Coast during the War of American Independence.

The digital archive can be used by future researchers and historians. It provides precise, 3-D images of the wreck if it were to ever be destroyed — or disappear, never to return.

More than a dozen heavy, water-soaked ship timbers were sticking out of the sand at low tide yesterday, about two miles east of the Race Point Beach ranger station in Provincetown.

The timbers, most likely uncovered by the heavy winter storms, last poked up out of the sand about five years ago. They also appeared once in the 1970s and once in the 1870s, according to Seashore historian William Burke.

"We were never sure we’d see it again," Burke said.

From CBC News

The Yukon government is seeking protection for the Gold Rush-era boat sitting at the bottom of Lake Laberge.

An aquatic archeological team in the summer of 2009 found the A.J. Goddard shipwreck to be in pristine shape at the bottom of the lake, which is located north of Whitehorse.

The heritage department has begun the process of designating the area a historic site.

Doug Olynyk, manager of historic sites for the Yukon government, said the designation will allow the government to open the site to educational tours and keep track of what goes on there.

"We definitely want to keep trrack of who's down there and what their intentions are," said Olnyk. "We want to have it available just like any other Yukon historic site for educational purposes, but we do want to control what activities are there."

Olynyk said they are counting on the public to watch for any unusual activities in the area.

Yukoners have 30 days to make their feelings known on the historic site request.

Launched during the Klondike Gold Rush in 1898, the A.J. Goddard vanished in Lake Laberge during a winter storm on Oct. 22, 1901. Two members of the five-man crew survived but the other three drowned.

The international archeological team, which includes Doug Davidge of the Yukon Transportation Museum, found the steamboat with its hull completely intact and many of the crew members' belongings preserved.

By Gillian Bell - The Press and Journal

Historical objects owned by a diving engineer who salvaged £50million of Russian gold from a wartime wreck will be sold at auction later this month.

Ric Wharton is selling a selection of the contents of Midmar Castle, near Echt, which was put on the market last year for offers over £3.5million.

Lots include a deep-sea diving helmet, a large collection of arms and a rare bronze cannon.

The cruiser HMS Edinburgh was sunk in 1942 after being torpedoed on the return leg of a voyage from the west coast of Scotland to Russia while carrying Soviet gold as payment to the US for military supplies.

Mr Wharton gambled Midmar to help fund the £3million operation to recover the ship’s treasure from the Barents Sea after rating his diving company’s chances at only 10% to 20%. When the expedition was successful in locating and recovering the haul in 1981, he used his share of the salvage reward to fund the restoration of the 16th-century castle and its collection.

Campbell Armour, of auction house Lyon and Turnbull, said: “Midmar is known as the first of the five great castles of Mar and contains many treasures collected by the gold bullion adventurer.”

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By LynThomas - Business & Finance, Society

Finding wrecks of the Spanish treasure fleet has long been the dream of many explorers, archeologists and would-be treasure hunters.

The ships convoyed treasure between the New World and Spain and included everything from timber, to silver, gold, gems, pearls, spices, sugar, tobacco and silk.

Treasure thieves however, gave themselves up to the police, recently in Madrid, Spain, when their partnership turned nasty.

The gardener, of a derelict mansion in the Catalan interior, broke into the home of his partners in crime and stole Euro 4.5 million worth of jewels and antiques. When a fight erupted, the two young Romanian thieves gave themselves up for arrest.

The nosy part-time gardener had peered through the windows of the derelict mansion and discovered a glittering collection of antique treasure displayed in glass cases. He apparently came up with the idea of breaking in to take a closer look.

Tthe thieves had no idea of the value of their haul. “These were inexperienced, common crooks who thought they were breaking into an old uninhabited house in the countryside,” a police spokesman said.

The 12th century family treasure, worth around Euro 300 million, was kept in a run-down country home, by wealthy aristocrat, 65 year old Jaume Grau-Pla.

A home he only visited during the summer and at weekends. He believed no one would suspect the old house would contain a fortune.

“Only those who had been inside the house knew what was kept there. Many of the things are invaluable. No amount of money could replace them,” said Grau-Pla.

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By Ilima Loomis - The Maui News

A World War II-era wreck off South Maui first documented in January has been identified as an SBC-2 Helldiver, ditched in Maalaea Bay on a training flight by a Navy pilot in 1944.

Maritime archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dived to the site Saturday and confirmed that it was the plane identified by two groups of private divers separately investigating the wreck.

He said the U.S. Navy was in the process of making a plaque to mark the site, which is protected under state and federal law, and that officials may also consider installing a mooring nearby.

Van Tilburg said the aircraft was a rare find, not only because the wreck was almost completely preserved, but also because there are very few Helldivers left in existence.

"I'm definitely impressed," he said. "It's remarkably intact. I've seen a number of aircraft like this, and this one is very intact. That makes it very special."

When the wreck was first documented in January, it was initially believed to be an SBD Dauntless dive bomber. But B&B Scuba Maui owner Brad Varney, who first reported the site to government authorities after learning about it from a local fisherman, said he realized after visiting the wreck a second time that it was actually a Helldiver.

Today the plane rests on the sandy bottom of Maalaea Bay in about 50 feet of water, encrusted with coral and surrounded by schools of fish.

According to Navy crash records researched by private divers investigating the site, the plane was making a dive-bombing practice attack Aug. 31, 1944, when high-speed maneuvers damaged the tail fin and jammed the rudder controls.

With only limited ability to control the aircraft, pilot William E. Dill, a Navy lieutenant, made a water landing, surviving the crash without injuries.

Varney, a self-described "history nut," said it was exciting to pore over 60-year-old crash reports and other documents as he and colleagues pieced the story together.

By David Johnson - Oa Online

Now, most World War II veterans are battling bad knees and fading hearing, but almost 70 years ago they faced German tanks and Italian bullets and Japanese mines.

Many U.S. servicemen were not able to grow old enough to experience arthritis, and some weren’t even able to be properly laid to rest.

Although Jarrold Clovis Taylor’s family had a memorial in September 1944 and a plaque with his name is in the Ector County Cemetery, his body was never there, and for almost 66 years, no one knew where he or any of the other 77 sailors from the USS Flier had gone to rest.

Clovis Taylor was born March 1, 1921, in Electra to J.G. and Beaulah Taylor; he was their first child. Nine more siblings survived to join him during the next 17 years, and his 87-year-old sister Eunice Wittie, now of Stephenville, remembers him well.

"I envied him because he was so good looking, and I was a girl and thought I should be the pretty one," Eunice said. "He was well-liked by everybody."

Newspaper clippings preserved by the family chronicle of some of the awards Clovis received while in high school in Electra, such as most representative boy and president of the freshman class of 1938. He also worked at the movie theater, for the same people who owned the newspaper, and was a member of the Texas National Guard.

"He was a very active person," Eunice said.

In March 1940, Clovis joined the Navy and went to San Diego. During the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was on the battleship USS Pennsylvania, which was hit but still able to sail.

During 1942, he saw several battles, including Midway.

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