Diving Bell, Using barrels to reduce clutter.

I love the idea of being able to dive to deep depths and explore underwater cave systems and dealing with what lurks below.

However i dont want ships to look ugly and bulky having all this diving equipment and what not.

Therefore you can use barrels as a diving bell.
Its actually done on assassins creed black flag and was a real thing. They used to dive down deep to collect pearls and salvage stuff of sunken ships.

How it works is simple.
Those dormant barrels you have on the ship you can pick up and throw overboard. The barrels will have weight on them cannon balls wrapped with sail cloth or something when you pick them up and a rope tied on the back.

Take the barrel to the edge of the ship and interact with it and you will throw it overboard. It will sink just below the water.

Use the inside of the barrel as an air pocket and interact with the rope to adjust the depth, or even better, let your crew adjust depth and you just hold onto the barrel. You can adjust depth from the rope on the ship or the rope attached to the barrel so diver and crew can both do this.

Reeling the barrel all the way back to the ship will cause the diving barrel to despawn and spawn back as a barrel in the place you originally picked it up.

WHAT CONTENT COULD THIS GIVE?

1. Deeper more rewarding shipwrecks but with more danger such as increased hostile sea life such as sharks etc. Some can even be a fake shipwreck where its actually an underwater skelly ship waiting for you to disturb (see number 7)

2. New locations to explore and lore opportunity, a really cool way to introduce the merfolk into the Sea of Thieves perhaps even uncovering their lair, the friendly and evil mermaids could be a thing down below.

3. A new biome rich with passive creatures such as coral reef, jelly fish etc.

4. A new way to kill the kracken!
   Dive down and start attacking its many eyes.
   (As kracken is simply tentacles, a new model will need to spawn deep below being the body and thousands of teeth. Whisker like mini tentacles can swat you away and hurt, or grab you and reel you closer to its mouth. Killing 2-3 eyes will be equivalent to one tentacle above sea but actually much harder to do then traditionally using your ship.

However doing so causes it more distress and will dislodge more loot that it has consumed.

5. New tall tales with an underwater theme

6. Occasional shipwreck and skeletons deep underwater depicting a tragic event prior to your visit. Kinda what bethesda do when they tell a story by showing skeletons or destroyed stuff.

7. Resting Skeleton Galleons and sloops.
   These ships will remain dormant below the waves but you can disturb them. Touching the deck will force it to emerge where your crew will be ready to fight.

They could also slowly glide along the bottom of the sea and emerge if they spot you making them something to avoid of you want to remain deep below without your ship being attacked. They will be sometimes moving and sometimes camoflaged in seaweed etc trying to trick you to get too close.

Moving underwater ships have little ghostly spotlights as they travel as if to keep an eye out for you or anything else Get spotted, it emerges upwards and despawns...triggering a skeleton ship event of the ship type you disturbed.

Worth noting... There is a LOT more skelly ships below the sea than above. As the above ships are simply scouts, the fleet is below.
You can only trigger one skelly ship event at a time though to prevent issues.

8. When salvaging ships, drag the barrel with you inside the shipwreck, bringing that air pocket with you, so you can strip the barrels of resources bare without resurfacing all the time.

I appreciate not all these ideas may fit into the scope of the game.
But hey, its lockdown and im bored lol.