The neighbours cats seem to like ‘doing their business’ in my garden!, I have tried absolutley everything to stop them, repellent, ultrasonic, lion poo! etc etc, I have even spoke to neighbours but they FOB me of with excuses. This is costing me a small fortune and I refuse to spend anymore money on this problem!

Any suggestions people?? 🙁

1) Collect cat poo.

2) Wait until dark.

3) Throw cat poo over fence.

The typical dig will yield maybe just a handful of items worth recording on the finds form + x lbs of misc scrap. The last dig we did had 1 reduction gear, 1 oxygen bottle, 2 propellor spigots, a section of engine bearer, half a dozen valves, a counter weight and about 150lb of misc engine fragments, mainly casing but some through bolts and cam shaft fragments and bits of alloy.

Maybe a longer time scale needs to be implemted or maybe a more detailed report to be added when all is done.

To what end?

I’d be interested to know what aircraft/engine type was being dug?

What is the true significance of the few parts that you mention?

Of course they are unique, irreplaceable and ‘valuable’ to those of us who value them and, if sold, would have a ‘cash’ market value but what more can we say about them?

Are they the only surviving examples of that aircraft/engine type? Could they help in an airworthy (or static) restoration? Would they allow drawings to be made if none existed, materials to be specified, or manufacturing techniques discovered if these are unknown? Do they hold vital information about how the aircraft was lost?

I’d suggest that the answer to all these questions is probably ‘no’.

If they are not going to be displayed in a museum (and I can’t think of a museum where I’ve seen everything recovered from a single wreck-site on display) then dispersion to those who dug (cleaned and catalogued) the relics is the best course. And should some of these relics end up on eBay (or at an aerojumble) then all the better.

Does anybody else think that eBay may actually discourage wreck-sites being illegally dug? A steady supply of relics to satisfy the collectors out there will depress prices and make it uneconomic for the unscrupulous.

Didn’t bomber crews ignore their assigned altitudes and simply fly as high as their bomber/payload would allow?

I too saw the Ark Royal documentary. It seemed to contradict the official version of events somewhat.

One interesting part was the presence, during filming of the wreck, of one of the Fulmar pilots. I can’t remember his name but apparently he was the very last man to abandon the Ark before she capsized.

Some very tantalising footage of Fulmars and Swordfish lying on the seabed at 900 metres. I expect they would disintegrate if any attempt was ever made to recover one of them.

Is Ark Royal protected as a war grave? Only one crew member lost his life and his body may have been removed before she sank.

I don’t think the Graf Zeppelin has been mentioned yet.

She was discovered in the Baltic at 80 metres (265 feet) by Polish divers in July 2006.

HMS Dasher – The forgotten Tragedy

It has been dived but it depends what you mean by ‘surveyed’. Conditions and depth would make things extremely challenging.

I found this site:

http://www.extremetechnical.org/hms_dasher.html

No way! Can’t possibly be a whole submarine! 😀

These are above the surface….just !!

I suppose these could be salvaged but at least two are missing about a third of their hulls (the engine/motor rooms and stern). I don’t think any of them have coning towers.

I not sure what would be more expensive. Raising a u-boat from the seabed or extracting these three from under the collapsed bunker.

There seems to have been little interest in U-534 and that only needed recovering from Birkenhead! 😀