Like every grand tale of shipwreck and lost treasure, the story about the Polluce has it all. A paddlewheel steamboat shipwrecked in 1841, it is the centrepiece of a drama spanning more than one and a half centuries and has all the necessary ingredients: drama and tragedy, greed and crime, passion and politics. And it is still ongoing. Polluce is about to be excavated once more as this story goes to press.

Did you know that kelp is an ingredient in many household foods! Foods like frozen foods, cakes, puddings, salad dressings, shampoos, and toothpastes contain alginate. Alginate is an apparently safe derivative of seaweed (kelp), and is used to maintains the desired texture in many products.

The island of Jeju, Korea, is an island of myths, gods and goddesses. It is also the birthplace of the women divers of Jeju. Although the women divers of Jeju are not the goddesses of myths, they are real alive mermaid goddesses.

Paris. City of lights, but of shadows, too. The capital has become a sought-out place for urban exploration. With walks across roofs, through the subways and the sewers and the ancient quarries known as the “Catacombs”.

In the years prior to World War II, the Italian fleet had developed a new underwater weapon, the SLC, a slow torpedo which was manned by two divers. Submerged, and thereby unseen, the frogmen on the SLC could get close in to the enemy ships and mine them. The frogmen trained in attacking their own ships, and after many excercises developed a procedure for approach and placing mines under the ships.

During the first years of World War II Italian frogmen demonstrated to the world how effective a weapon a frogman could be. Hidden by the water, these frogmen mined the Allies’ ships as they were moored ‘safely’ in their own waters.

Reaching out to a new generation of divers

The ocean has been regarded as a global commons whose resources are inexhaustible and therefore free for the taking.

The surface of the 12-foot pool bubbles like a hot tub while instructors below signal to a group of dive students using a series of hand signals on how to inflate their vest.

We were headed for the island of Kefalonia off the western coast of mainland Greece. This would be the starting point of the “Life Amphibious” underwater odyssey. The plan was to pedal a human-powered submarine 15 nautical miles (28 kilometres) through the Ionian Sea to mythical Ithaca, the home of Ulysses. In the spirit of Homer’s epic and Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo, we would soon begin our own grand voyage to Ithaca.