Underwater treasure hunting on the ban list?

If you like to dive for your treasure then you may want to start keeping a closer eye on the United Nations. The international pinheads have decided that they want to ban all underwater treasure hunting, well, commercial treasure hunting that is, in an effort to “protect underwater cultural heritage”.

According to the UN convention it will still be legal for the archies to do their thing but anyone wanting to actually hunt for a profit will be banned from doing so. They say they are trying to protect the underwater artifacts for future generations however if nobody is looking for them then they won’t be very protected as they sit on the bottom of the ocean and slowly dissolve away with time.


In my opinion the pinheads don’t care about cultural heritage. If they did then the different countries that have joined this convention would spend a lot more money each trying to locate and recover these “cultural” artifacts but they don’t. They just sit like vultures waiting for someone who has spent their own hard earned money and time to find them and then they swoop in and try to take it all away. Do I sound bitter?

I agree that some laws are needed to govern the unscrupulous treasure hunters but they always go overboard and I sure don’t think there should be some international law defining what each country can and cannot do.


Nova Scotia is the latest country to jump on board with the U.N. convention, banning all commercial underwater treasure hunting beginning 1 January 2011.


If I were a lawyer I think I would come up with a new interpretation of “commercial treasure hunting” and find away around this stupid law. Governments are notorious for not looking for these so called cultural artifacts and the majority of them are only found by pure accident or by professional treasure hunters. I think this will drastically decrease the amount of the “cultural heritage” found in the future.


As far as I can tell our own pinheads in D.C. have not joined this convention, not yet anyway, but you might keep your eyes open for any kind of legislation in the future. How long will it be before they decide that the ground we walk on contains “cultural heritage” and ban us from any type of treasure hunting? They have done this in some areas already but the pinheads are notoriously ignorant of real life so one of these days we may all be fighting to keep our hobby/profession from being killed off by these morons.