Wreck Logs - Cornish Diving
Cornwall from a maritime point of view might be considered a treacherous peninsula protruding into the Atlantic. The demise of countless vessels and loss of thousands of lives, is in part due to the very nature of the coastline. Cornwall takes the full brunt of Atlantic storms and is the first landfall on the western approaches. Stormy seas, navigational errors and two world wars have resulted in a coastline littered with shipwrecks and steeped in history. Each wreck has a story to tell, often a very sad one.
Treat wrecks with respect
Recently attitudes towards wreck diving have been subject to much attention in the media. Conflicting opinions over issues such as interfering with wargraves or wrecks being pillaged and plundered by divers have caused much controversy between the ‘diving community’ and ‘the rest of the world’! I feel divers have had a bad press and while I accept that not all divers treat the wrecks with as much respect as they deserve, the majority do.
The unspoken rule!
There are some unspoken rules within the diving community; some wrecks are never dived out of respect to the lives lost in the wrecking of the vessel. An example of this is the Penlee lifeboat, where all hands were lost while attempting a rescue on the Union Star. Many divers adopt a “look but don’t touch” approach, while others are prone to taking the odd souvenir.
