|
Lost Treasure, sunken Tatra 600 Tatraplans
 Strait of Georgia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
|
Entry Type: Boat
Aquatic Life: Might See Something
|
Winter: Under 50°F/10°C
|
|
|
|
Lost Treasure, sunken Tatra 600 Tatraplans is a boat accessible salt water dive site, located at Strait of Georgia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Location unknown :(
The Tatra 600, or Tatraplan. Powered by a flat-four engine, the Tatraplan is a little bit Ur-Saab, a little bit Tatra T87 (V-8), and a little bit VW Beetle. A boatload of them was traded for a shipment of wheat, and headed towards Canadian shores.
And yet, the Tatraplans’ timing couldn’t have been worse. The dates on the newspaper clippings seem to indicate the first cars started showing up at Vancouver’s docks about a month after Joe McCarthy got up and made his famous speech about the bureaucracy of America being riddled with communists. The innocent Tatraplans found themselves shunned and vandalized.
The cars sat on the lots, including a bunch over in the capital of Victoria at Shorter’s Electric, a refrigerator sales company that also sold horsemeat (yes, really). At some point, so the rumour goes, they were simply barged out to the middle of the Strait, and dumped into the water.
How many? Nobody knows. Where’d they drop them? Everybody on that tug is now probably long dead. A restored Tatraplan is pretty valuable, and while seawater would be murder on them, the Pacific is very cold, so perhaps there’s still something salvageable out there. It’s a mystery.
Rumour has it, there’s a barge-load of postwar Czechoslovakian machinery beneath the waves of the Strait of Georgia near Vancouver.
Now there are also newspaper photos of Austin A-40’s being dumped, these front engine cars wouldn’t be collector items.