If there is one game you don't want to play with Steven R. McPhee it is counting the number of bottles of beer on the wall.

Mr. McPhee has a collection of over 2,000 antique bottles, most of which he has found himself while diving.

He has shared his passion by releasing a book 'A Guide to Collecting Old Bermuda Bottles'. It is now available at the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute (BUEI), Brown & Company and other bookstores around the island.

"When I first started bottle diving I never knew how to date a bottle, or identify it," he said. "I never had a source to refer to.

"That was one of the ideas behind the book. I am not saying I have covered every single way of dating a bottle, but with the book, you should be able to narrow it down to within ten years."

He started bottle diving not long after qualifying as a commercial diver several years ago.

"Rather than go out on shipwrecks all the time, I started diving in the harbour," he said. "I didn't have a boat or anything. Almost immediately I started finding bottles. The more you look, the more you find."

It wasn't hard to find the bottles. Most of them were in just 15 feet of water. There are no restrictions on taking bottles, although you can not take them off of shipwreck sites.

"They are just bottles that have been thrown overboard or found over time," he said.

Mr. McPhee has found bottles that date back to Bermuda's discovery.

"You can find bottles from that period on up to the beginning of the 1900s. Those are the type of bottles you are looking for. After that they are machine made.

"The earliest bottle I have got is from 1690. I have two and they are called onion bottles. There is one version of the bottle which is an earlier predecessor which is the shaft & globe bottle."

There is a picture of the shaft & globe bottle in his book. He borrowed the bottle from a friend to take the photo.

"There are quite a few people that I know who collect bottles," he said. "Whether they dive for themselves or have found them on land is the difference. I have been in lots of people's houses who have bottles. Some of them found them themselves, while others traded them with other people."

His favourite spots for finding bottles are in Hamilton Harbour or just outside the Harbour alongside Harbour Road in Paget or Warwick.

"I have been quite lucky all along there," he said.

In some ways his hobby points to the long-lasting result of littering.

"It is amazing how much stuff is down there," said Mr. McPhee. "It seems like people use to throw away whole sets of pottery.

"There are plates, bowls, porcelain bed pans, cups and saucers. It is usually in front of some of the older houses."

Another technique he has used is to look at photos to see where old boats were moored.

"Sometimes I have found where a ship has broken its mooring in a storm and sunk and everything is gone except for maybe what was on the boat," he said. "There are patterns to the way you find things."

Bottles themselves last quite a long time. And he said storms don't change the bottom as much as one would expect.

"Once I found this bottle in a certain spot from the 1700s. It had a little hole, so I didn't want it. I went away and was working in the United States for five years. I came back and went back to the same spot and the bottle was still there, almost in the exact same place. It was just rolling around. I ended up taking it back even with the hole in it. It was a nice bottle."

Mr. McPhee said there are some areas on the seafloor that are just covered in bottles.

"There are a lot in Harrington Sound," he said. "You will find them anywhere along the coast where there are houses."

He said that one technique for finding bottle sites was to examine old photographs.

"Look at where old houses use to be along the coast," he said. "You can go diving and find bottles there almost always."

Mr. McPhee said the most commonly found bottles are from the Victorian period, because bottle production and Bermuda's population increased during this time.

"Earlier than that you would have freeblown bottles," he said. "You will find a lot of fragments of the old ones."

There are a couple of different ways to date the bottles, he said.

"There are pontil marks which was made from the tool that was used to hold the bottle on the bottom. They were made by hand by the glass maker and that left a mark on the bottle.

"Later they had other tools which replaced the pontil rod, such as the snap case.

"That left the bottom flat. That is when they started embossing bottles as well. Companies started putting their names on the bottom first, and then eventually started putting it on the sides also."

Mr. McPhee's book explains many of the different techniques used to make bottles, and the different ways that collectors date them.

He now has so many bottles he sometimes has to get rid of a few.

"I have sold some of my bottles in the past to certain people," he said. "Generally, I keep them, but now because my collection has grown, I just pick up the ones I want to keep. Before, I use to take whatever I found."

He displays the bottles around his house on bookshelves and in window sills.

"I started getting too many around the house," he said. "You are also finding other things aswell as bottles. I find metal objects such as old anchors and cannon balls. I ended up taking a lot of stuff and just putting it back in the water. If I ever need a certain type of bottle I can just go there and get it."

Antique bottles often come in different colours such as aqua, amethyst, green, brown, and amber. Cobalt blue was often used to indicate poison.

"Before paper labels were made poison bottles might have been embossed with the words poison on the side, and a skull & crossbones," he said. "It would be ridged so you could feel it.

"There is a whole evolution of bottles which follows Bermuda's history. It is quite interesting."

As a professional commercial diver he works on projects that involves moorings, salvage and surveys for insurance companies, among other things.

He qualified at the Canadian Working Divers School in Canada.

"You spend three months there," he said. "You are diving or doing practical and theory work."

After commercial diving school he worked in South American for six months, and then went to San Francisco, California.

"One of the things I specialised in was ultrasonic testing for ships," he said. "San Francisco Harbour is a very busy port for ships.

"A lot of the ships that come in have to be surveyed on the bottom on a regular basis. So I was diving under the big ships which are 300 feet long. I was testing the thickness of the hull.

"We were making sure their thickness was tolerable by the insurance companies."