Okay, Okay, I’ll admit, of the three of us, I’m the one most likely to cling to my finds. . . all of them, regardless of how common a bottle may be. Hey, I still have a couple of old beer cans kicking around from my childhood collection.

As I descended down my anchor line, I flicked on my dive light. Crap, I forgot to change the batteries in my dive light. The water was particularly cloudy that day since it had rained earlier that week. My weak light produced no more light than a candle. Needless to say, I cautiously crawled along the bottom becoming surprised at each find for that day.

So when I stumbled upon this 1870s Rush’s Buchu and Iron A.H. Flanders M.D. New York medicine bottle mostly submerged in the sand, I thought to myself, hmmm, this looks like a cool bottle. Heck, every bottle looks cool to me, but this one seemed different. I packed it up carefully and continued through the rest of my dive.

As is common at the end of our dives, we take time to talk about our finds of the day and debrief about other specifics of the dive. “Oh that’s a cool one,” and sometimes “Oh, I have five of those.” But this time Matt (the most senior subsurface antiquities expert of us) said “WOW!” A sudden rush went through me. Ed, (our official Neil Pert, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson – aka RUSH expert) said “WOW!” I said “WOW?” Needless to say, the thrill of that day got even better.

As we continue to dive, we find significant bottles from time to time. This bottle may or may not be of significant value, but to me it’s a treasure none the less.