enlarge Photos courtesy Richard Carney Jr.

Seaglass of Maine diver and artist Rick Carney is on a boat and all geared up for a treasure hunt.

enlarge

These are examples of stained glass lampshades diver and artist Richard Carney creates using sea glass from his dive searches. He displays the work at crafts shows.

enlarge Photo courtesy Richard Carney Jr.

Rick Carney, left, poses with client Wayne Berthiaume of Biddeford, who hired him to recover a custom-made wedding band from the bottom of Stanley Pond in Cornish.

As an independent photocopier repairman, Richard Carney Jr. earns a living producing copies. Though, in his free time, he'd prefer to work with originals.

Carney, 50, of Brunswick is a self-professed "treasure hunter" who collects about 2,000 artifacts each year. Those items range from antique bottles, clay pipes and doll heads to 7-foot anchors dating from the 1800s. Most of the items are harvested from underwater dives at sites that historically served as hubs of activity.

Waterfronts near long forgotten hotel resorts yield jewelry and coins lost by former guests during recreation, while the last vestiges of old docks are littered with glass and earthenware, discarded as trash by 19th-century cargo ship crews.

One favorite haunt of Carney's is Wiscasset Harbor, which in 1822 had 27 docks to accommodate large sailing vessels.

"As far as you can swim, in any direction, there is nothing but glass and pottery in every color of the spectrum," said Carney of the harbor. He dives throughout the year at sites spanning from Connecticut to northern Maine and prefers to collect items dating from 1790 to 1860.

Carney once solely collected whole objects, leaving behind a huge cache of broken seaglass. One day, during a dive, he envisioned using the sea glass to create one-of-a-kind, stained glass art works.

"This was a passion that I turned into an art form," said Carney, who sells his creations at craft fairs and by commission. "My first piece was a Tiffany-style lamp shade. It was pretty impressive. So, I made another one. (The work) just exploded from there. Now, I can't make them fast enough."

Carney incorporates found items into his pieces. He's used an 1810 sugar bowl lid, old skeleton keys and an eight-inch bronze maiden figure head as centerpieces for stained glass window panels. And he once used vintage 1910 fishing lures to create a scene of the sun rising over fish in a lake for a commissioned piece he named "Morning Over Rangeley."

Carney's passion for the work is detailed in one chapter of author Carole Lambert's 2008 book, "A Passion for Sea Glass."

"I'd heard about this unusual man who dived for all kinds of treasure," said Lambert, who was compelled to include Carney's story in her book. "Rick has taken a childhood pastime and turned it into a fantastic, never-ending treasure hunt. I was overwhelmed with the sheer volume of artifacts he had retrieved."

"I have a gift for finding things," said Carney, who also lends his skill to search for other people's lost objects using an underwater metal detector. "I do that a few times each year."

Wayne Berthiaume, 47, of Biddeford, recently hired Carney to find a wedding ring he'd lost when his canoe capsized during a father and son fishing trip to Stanley Pond in Cornish.

Wayne mourned the ring's loss not for its monetary worth but for its sentimental value. He'd had it custom-made during a trip to Israel and it was a symbol of his Christian faith and fidelity to his wife, Dina.

Wayne's loss also weighed heavily on his father, Oliver Berthiaume, who felt personally responsible for the canoe-tipping accident.

"It's not like I could just walk into a local jewelry store and replace (the ring), you know what I mean," said Wayne, who immediately sought diving services to recover it. "(Carney's) been doing this for like 30 years and said he has a 98 percent success rate to recover things. He dove in the water – and I'm not kidding – he came back up in like 60 seconds with the thing in his hand! It was really cool. My father started crying."

Carney seemed pleased to hear of Oliver's tears of relief, noting, "The father approached me before the dive. He was troubled and said, 'I prayed last night that you'd find the ring.' I told him, 'We'll find it and it will all come out great.' "

The Berthiaumes helped Carney navigate the lake...