I hope this project will raise the profile of Cornwall's maritime heritage, which I think is very important, but not that well known. People tend to think of shipwrecks and then instantly make the jump to treasure. But I'd like this to show how people can get involved and find out for ourselves what is there, telling the story about these wrecks, breaking new ground.

There's lots of work done on the documentary side of things, especially on the later wrecks, but this is going at it from another angle, seeing what is actually left on the seabed, what state it is in, and what we can do about it.

On Colossus we have got the stern and the bow sections, found at separate times a considerable distance apart, so the idea was for the project to look at the area between the two and try to understand how it came apart, why it spread out over such an area, and just what is left on the sea bed. There are two aspects to the debris field survey, one very technical, where we have to use "geophysics" to detect the wreckage; and the other putting divers on the sea bed to see what we've actually got.

We've done one field survey, which was quite successful despite the appalling weather last September. And the geophysical survey is planned for April 2005. Then the final part of the survey will be in September 2005, and that's when we'll know whether we've got anything outstanding to report.

We're aiming to launch the St Mary’s museum display in mid-May - to coincide with the Battle of Trafalgar bicentenary celebrations, because of the project's connections with Nelson. The museum display at St Mary's is going to be open in May. It's costing more than we anticipated, and it has eaten up some of the funds that were meant for other parts of the project. But it was necessary - and the LHI team were happy for us to use the "contingency" part of our grant to pay for it.

Nelson probably stood in the cabin of that ship - the captain was a friend of Nelson’s. Colossus was homeward bound with wounded from the Battle of the Nile and Sir William Hamilton's collection of pottery - that's the husband of Nelson's mistress, Emma Hamilton - when the ship was wrecked.

She was at anchor in St Mary's when the anchor cable parted and she drove onto the rocks and was wrecked. Some of the wreck was salvaged at the time and over the next hundred years, early divers like the Deans had a go at her and recovered bits.

There's a lovely story - probably not true - that a salvaged cannon went off, even after 50 years in the sea.

In the 1960s and '70s Roland Morris, a Penzance salvage operator, found part of the front of the HMS Colossus including cannon, anchors and early Greek funerary pottery which was part of the cargo – the pottery was sold to the British Museum and is now on display there.

One piece - part of the stern decoration of the ship - was recovered from the seabed in 2002 and is currently being conserved at the Mary Rose Trust, but will eventually be on display in Valhalla on Tresco. Tresco Gardens has a small collection of ships' figureheads.