Looks back on his underwater the ocean’s sunken treasures
The waves searching for a fortune in scrap abandoned on the world’s seabed
with artefacts from his dives partner, Moya, on Foula. Originally from Lewis, she joined Alec, Simon and JohnAndrew, as they continued to sweep the Oceanic debris.
During that time, they faced ownership disputes, lost ships to winter storms and required two emergency airlifts to hospital for Alec – when he surfaced too quickly and got “the bends” and when he was crushed by falling equipment on deck. Luckily, neither cut short his diving career.
“In the 1970s, risks weren’t assessed in the same way as today,” he recalled. “We had a lot more freedom. Dismantling these wrecks means inherent risks but there’s also a lot of
Picture: Andrew Cawley pleasure and sense of achievement that outweighs it.”
Under British law, items found on shipwrecks are declared to the salvager of wreck, who must try to find its owner. If an owner is found, the salvager receives a “salvage award” according to the value of the goods.
When word spread of the valuable haul coming from the Oceanic, Shetland-based Hay & Co came forward to contest ownership of the wreck in court. Alec said: “We ended up paying them a very small percentage for everything we recovered, which was good because it wasn’t a lot of money from our point of view!”
Alec and Simon recovered 250 tonnes of valuable metal from the wreck over five years and hundreds of dives. The money they made from their salvage set them up for life.
Alec and Moya bought a farm in Fife and started a world-leading deep-sea salvage company, Deep Water Recovery and Exploration. They invented and developed pioneering technology and equipment to remotely locate and salvage wrecks at unprecedented depths.
This includes a recordbreaking £1 million copper haul 1,250m underwater from a French cargo ship lost off the coast of Spain. They were the first to reach and recover precious gems and artefacts from the SS Persia, 3,000m down in the Mediterranean Sea.
“After Moya and I married we had this ambition to do deep-water salvage. The diving ended when we moved to working remotely with underwater cameras,” said Alec.
“It is very different way of exploring a wreck because you’re not physically or emotionally involved in the same way but you do cut out the dangerous aspects. I became more interested in the engineering side as we moved from physical risk to financial risk. The problem with deepwater salvage isn’t how deep you can go, but how you can do it cost-effectively, and the engineering is driven by that.”
Alec and Moya’s four children all spent time at sea with their parents and have gone on to work in different underwater engineering, diving and salvaging jobs. After 50 years, Alec remains fascinated by the underwater world of marine salvage. Taking up writing has allowed him to delve deeper into how it all began with a few fateful dives off remote Scottish islands. “I still work in equipment design part-time but I can’t get a medical certificate to go to sea any more.
“But I’m fascinated about the future of deep-water salvage and I love writing about the past. Writing has allowed me to look back on everything we’ve achieved and describe it with a fresh perspective. The first book only goes up to 1977, so I don’t intend to stop any time soon.”
Treasure Islands: True Tales of a Shipwreck Hunter by Alec Crawford is published by Birlinn