Granted, even if I did have the appropriate papers allowing me to use a self contained underwater breathing apparatus, the waters around the 1694 wreck of of the HMS Sussex, which went down in the Strait of Gibraltar off the coast of Spain are too deep for normal diving.
The team that is attempting to pillage the sunken vessel are using deep water submersibles and specialized sonar equipment to locate the Sussex. When they finally do locate the 300 year old wreck, they intend to retrieve its sunken treasure, believed to be the world’s richest treasure: ten tons of gold coin, with an estimated value of around 4.4 billion dollars.
Sure, the company that is spearheading the search-and-retrieval mission, the U.S.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration, intends to split the treasure with its country of origin (Britain), they’ll still surely recoup whatever their investment is and then some. A whole lot of some, the fucking pirates.
Spain apparently has the world’s richest amount of shipwrecks, leading one archeology professor, Manuel Martin Bueno, to comment,
There is more gold in the Gulf of Cadiz than in the Spanish national bank.”
There’s got to be some beneath a diveable depth. I want to pillage! Yarrrr!
Hunt on for world’s biggest underwater treasure in Spain [rawstory.com]
(image:WorldAtlas.com)
Get it anyway. There’s nothing like it. The past 10-15 years the Ad-Wizards at PADI have been dumbing down scuba diving and passing it off as a tranquil, peaceful, fun for the whole family activity, only to have their asses handed to them by the rise of Extreme-anything sports. Anyone who’s trying to fight against the current of the massive bombardments of “diving is fun! diving is safe! diving is fashionable and fun for the whole family!” always go TOO FAR in the other direction and come off as misogynist chest-thumping Navy SEAL wannabes that would even make Richard Marcinko say “dude, take it easy.”
The coast of Cuba probably has just as many shipwrecks as anywhere else, but no one is really allowed to dive there too much, so they’ve yet to be discovered. It’s also relatively (compared to say, the Cayman Trench a hundred or so miles south) shallow and within the realm of normal recreational divers. A friend of mine is an underwater photog and author of a few books specifically about shipwrecks in this region and just got back from a research trip to Maria La Gorda off the south coast of Cuba and has been raving about it while trying to set up an expedition to go back to search & catalog.