My name is Ray Ives and I'm 75 years old.
The first memory is ship movement, feeling seasick...
...being very young and very inexperienced.
Commercially, I've been diving since 1965 for a living.
I've got a lot of china, clay pipes, bottles…
…clay bottles, jars, propellers, portholes, swords,...
...guns, ammunition boxes; the old type, made of teak…
…still with the empty shells in, bayonets
Anything that people didn't want they threw over the side because there was no means of getting it back and nobody could find it.
Well my collection of artefacts and helmets and things...
most of it came from Plymouth, but a lot of things like, Dartmouth,...
…Brixham, Torquay, the wrecks off Dover
up in Scotland as well, came from all over really.
Well the sea is the biggest rubbish dump in the world I think.
Well I have a rapier sword in my collection which I found in a freshwater river up near Bideford.
And it's engraved in Latin and I think it dates something between 17 and 18 century.
I've got silver coins from the Association,…
…and pillar dollars from the Alandia.
Everybody wants gold and a mermaid
Oh I would say I would be a very good pirate and a scrannyer.
Well when I left the dockyard, from a salvage boat in the dockyard I joined one of the biggest salvage firms in the country at the time…
…and they used to go around salvaging all the ships, any accidents, ships on the bottom,...
…anything like that, and if there was treasure they’d try and go for it, even in deep water with a grab and that
But when they discovered oil in the early 1970s, the main thing then was to get all the oil ashore as quick as possible to try and get some money back from all the money they’d spent.
So safety wasn’t a priority in them days. So we were working flat out,…
...6, 7, 8 weeks at a time and probably getting a week off and then going back out there.
Trying to get the oil back to England.
My Boat 'Nymet', It's 21 foot long and it's like a fat lady really; sits well in the water.
It's accessible so we can go diving in it,
Or I can go fishing in it, or I can take young ladies out in it…
…and we can go have a look round and have a couple of beers.
Well there's 3 or 4 different types of diving
There's air diving, skin diving and then you eventually finish up as a first class professional saturation diving...
…where you spend maybe a month under pressure and half that month is spent in the water.
People come from all over the country to Plymouth to dive.
It's one of the best diving resorts, because of obviously all the wrecks…
…and access to the water and things like that.
For someone who's never dived, I couldn't explain really.
Well it's like when you're on the moon I suppose. I've never been on the moon…
…but when you're on the bottom, it's sandy like the moon.
You feel pressure on your body, especially the deeper you go
and I guess it just reminds you of space.
If you hold your breath, it's absolutely perfect.
If you get means of lifting the silt and sand from wherever you're looking and you come across something that shiny a quiver goes through you and your hair stands up hoping its going to be gold.
But very often it's not.
Well if you are on your last bar of air and you thought you found something that was really valuable you'd go right down to the last breath and still be trying to grab it as you went to the surface.
Obviously not working now, as a diver, I can see more which I never saw before. Because now you can go down, when you are doing it for fun and you can see everything.
The marine growth and the sea fern and the plymrosia…
…red, pink and white, it's like being in a bluebell wood really, it's absolutely wonderful.
My life has been quite adventurous really, because I've worked and travelled all over the world.
And I've earned enough money to settle down and have an ice cream once a week and a pint of beer.
Well as long as I can climb in and climb out, I'm gonna carry on doing it
Well probably when I'm 80 I'll stop…
And then I'll take up real diving then [laughing]
Which is done in the pub!