“In the late 90s, I was chief instructor for Kevin Gurr’s technical diving school, Phoenix Diver Training, and had gradually climbed the instructional ranks to become one of the, at that time, few Open Circuit Trimix Instructors with IANTD in the U.K.

We completed a lot of our training, by preference, in the sea, either in the Sound of Mull in Scotland or out of the coastal town of Looe in Cornwall, depending on the season and conditions. The Cornish south coast was my preference due to the abundance of shipwrecks, excellent visibility, and manageable tides. The courses were based out of Looe Divers, then owned and managed by John Bass, and used the dive boat Sea Urchin, owned and managed by Mally.

One of our favourite dive sites on the course was a sailing ship with a cargo of varied glassware, including decanters. Not positively identified, she was known as ‘The Glass Wreck’. She sat in 65 metres of water on a rocky, shaly seabed, usually offering excellent conditions, and on 17 June 1998 we set out excited to dive her again.

The dive team was Bob Morrison, Pat, Rick, and myself, and as we entered the water in some current, it was a bit of work to successfully untangle the deployed decompression station before continuing down the shot to land on the seabed and find ‘No Wreck!’.

Undeterred, I tied off a reel and headed off, following the shot's drag mark in the seabed, and soon saw ahead the shadow of the wreck, where the reel was tied off. This meant an unusual approach to the wreck, up over the hull, where, looking down between the outer and inner hull plates, Bob spotted an object: the bell!

Bob quickly and easily removed the small bell, placed it in a stout bag, and bagged it up. We then continued with our 22-minute bottom time before returning to the shot, retrieving the reel, ascending to and releasing our decompression station, and completing 41 minutes of decompression, most of it spent curious as to what, if any, information the bell would reveal.

On surfacing and de-kitting, and after the obligatory post-dive cup of tea, a soft brush was taken and the bell gently scrubbed free of marine life to reveal: ‘Charlwood. 1877. Liverpool.’ No longer just ‘The Glass Wreck’.

A little piece of south coast U.K. maritime history solved, and a beautiful dive with a great team.”