Let's face it. One of the things that attracts so many of us to UK diving is the number of wrecks in our home waters. From archaeological sites with a few rotting timbers and rusty nails to intact behemoths of twentieth century shipping, there will be a diver who champions a particular wreck as their favourite dive.
The trouble is that wrecks just don't last forever. Storms, rust, commercial and amateur salvage and diver erosion are all playing a role in slowly breaking our favourite wrecks apart. Wrecks that were once intact are now mere skeletons, and wrecks that were skeletons have become piles of flattened plates.
The earliest shipwrecks came from bad weather and navigational errors. Modern ship design and navigational aids has put a stop to most of that. Apart from a few notable exceptions such as the Cita in the Isles of Scilly, ships just don't steam into the rocks as conveniently as they used to.
Even when a massive environmental disaster occurs, such as the Sea Empress grounding in the entrance to Milford Haven, the ship is eventually re-floated and repaired. OK, the oil slick was not the sort of thing that anyone would welcome, but they could at least have left the wreck there for me to dive on!
We also have the benefits of wrecks from a couple of world wars in our home waters and world-wide. Submarines have sunk many ships in convenient coastal locations ; One good torpedo hit below the waterline and a ship can sink in almost intact condition on an even keel. Maybe this created an environmental problem at the time, but a few decades on and we have a prime dive site.
Shipping losses like these just don't happen any more. We can't even count on a war to make a decent wreck. The longer ranges of modern aircraft and weapons means that ships get sunk in deeper water in far off corners of the world. Although an Exocet missile is great at blowing the superstructure off a ship, it won't necessarily sink it.
A winter or two ago an old and rotting oil rig moored at Portland came loose in a storm. It bumped about a bit, damaged piers and harbour walls, was beached and eventually salvaged. Why not just clean it up, tow it out into 40 metres of water and sink it? How about just to the east side of Portland, where it can provide a fall back site for those days when the weather is too rough to get round Portland Bill to dive the Salsette?
And what about all those other oil rigs being decommissioned. Remember the "battle" between Greenpeace and Shell over the Brent Spar platform? The original plan was to sink it in deep ocean water - out of sight and out of mind. Environmental protests lead to it being moored up inshore for dismantling, decontamination and disposal ashore.
What a waste; a platform that size offers the prospect of an almost perfect dive site. It could be sunk in water deep enough for techies to explore the base with trimix, whilst air divers explored underneath the platform, cave divers explored the cabins and corridors, and basic open water lessons took place at 6 metres on the helicopter pad. A few years in the right location and it would be covered in marine life and home to thousands of fish.
Elsewhere in the world old ships and other junk are regularly disposed of in convenient diving locations. Local businesses are actively seeking opportunities to create more dive sites for a growing tourist industry.
Off Florida there are hundreds of wrecks in the artificial reef programme and it isn't just divers who benefit, anglers have a great time fishing on them.
In some parts of the world artificial reefs have been bad for the fish stocks. Fish enter the new reef from the surrounding area. If these are then caught and removed from the scene, more will follow, to the point where an over-fished artificial reef acts as a siphon of fish from the surrounding area. This effect has lead to artificial reef projects actually being banned in the Philippines. But the problem is really uncontrolled over-fishing, not the artificial reefs.
In Britain we can see purpose sunk wrecks happening to some extent at inland dive sites. Boats, helicopters, buses, aeroplanes, armoured vehicles and cars have all been deliberately sunk by site owners to provide something for divers to play on.
The only wreck I know of sunk deliberately for divers in British waters is the Glenn Strathallan off Plymouth. Sunk in 1970 as an “underwater classroom” by the Fort Bovisand diving school, the wreck turned out to be too shallow and had to be dispersed a year later. Since then, nothing.
Perhaps British law is too complex. Perhaps there are too many interested parties with conflicting views. Perhaps no one knows just how to organise it. Perhaps we need a diving MP to read this and champion the cause of dumping more junk at sea. Other parts of the world find it makes economic and environmental sense, maybe it could work here.
So if your employer owns an old oil rig or super-tanker he is seeking to conveniently dump somewhere, put in a word for divers. We have to think of our future generations of divers. If we don't act now there could be no wrecks left on which they can dive.