Find Gold While Diving?: Undercurrent 10/2025

Find Gold While Diving?

losers, weepers may not apply

from the October, 2025 issue of Undercurrent

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Perhaps the three most common questions asked of divers by non-divers are: 1) How deep do you go? 2) Have you ever seen a shark? And 3) Have you ever found any treasure?

Finding treasure while diving has ramifications. A story that has been in the making for 30 years is just now nearing a conclusion. French prosecutors have gathered enough evidence -- including a confession from wreck-looting diver Yves Gladu and gold bars in hand reportedly sold by American couple Gay and Philip Courter -- to formally request that these three and another defendant stand trial for trafficking stolen treasure. The gold, they say, is from an 18th-century shipwreck, the Le Prince de Conty, an East Indiaman sunk in a storm in 1746 off the French coast.

"Gérard turned up one day in 1984 with a briefcase containing 20 gold bars."

Gay Courter, an American best-selling author, said she was given the gold by French friends, Annette May Pesty, 78, and her now-deceased partner, Gérard. According to the Courters, telling them that his brother-in-law, Yves Gladu, an underwater photographer, had recovered them from a wreck....

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