Ok one more thing I feel the need to share. Nobody has ever invited me to any discussion on how to handle future contracts. Sure you could say why? Who are you to think you should be involved. Let me try to explain, then I need to give my two typing fingers a much deserved break. No company or investor is coming here to do this work for free. Even volunteers will jump ship once they know of the hardship of living here. There has to be an incentive. And the lure of treasure is always an incentive. Lets look back at Burt Webbers discovery. He found thousands of coins.( I don’t want to guess at how many because he gets a little on edge when I don’t get it right). But say he found twenty thousand coins. He takes half. His investors are happy the company is happy and they can continue to fund activities and attract investors. Now though the DR government has ten thousand coins, and guess what, they still have their share thirty years later nicely packed away in a safe. Do they need more? Are they displaying them in a national museum, NO. So how many more coins do they need? Apparently they have enough. I am pretty sure the government chooses what they want in divisions, like all one of kind items. So to make a proper division take the one of a kind item and make up for it with coins. Why not you got thousands. Every artifact if done correctly is logged recorded and photographed. I myself am happy with just the photographs and my personal satisfaction of making the discovery/recovery. But companies have to pay for operations and qualified personnel and need to continue to attract investors. So you pay with what you really don’t need. Everybody is happy. To think anybody is going to race down here and dump tons of money into these projects and receive what the DR government feels is a justifiable payoff of the artifacts then no one will be interested. This process of a division with artifacts of many of the same types would take all of about an hour to draw up. EVEN right now as it is it is a win win for this government. They get paid for the contract of $3000.00us A pretty nice sum especially if you had a half a dozen companies. They already require a professional archaeologist to be present. For sakes of today’s argument, run the archaeologist through a rigorous process of qualification. This is also paid by the contractors, So a sound report is always sitting on the desk of ONPCS. If there is a violation then punish the company six months of not giving an inspector, no more diving until the situation has been rectified or some form of punishment to make sure all rules are adhered to.
What is happening now is NOT working. Waiting several more years to come up with a new plan is ridiculous. Do something now. Stop the bleeding. Fine tune it as time allows. Get these folks back on the water and at least police these areas.
Oh and I could use a hug.
