Wreck Diving - Wreck Diving Sites

Wreck Diving Sites

There are thousands of popular wreck diving sites throughout the world. Some of these are artificial wrecks or sunk deliberately to attract divers (such as the USS Spiegel Grove and the USS Oriskany in Florida, the Bianca C in Grenada, and the wrecks of Recife in Pernambuco/Brazil which include artificial and disaster wrecks).

Others are wrecks of vessels lost in disasters (such as the RMS Rhone in the British Virgin Islands, the Zenobia in Cyprus and the many shipwrecks off the Isles of Scilly in England). In the Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand, the wreck of the MS Mikhail Lermontov, a 177-meter cruise liner which was lost in 1986, is a popular dive site. Lying at 37 meters underwater, this wreck is an excellent base for recreational and technical divers.

A number of the most enigmatic wreck diving sites relate to ships lost to wartime hostilities, such as the SS Thistlegorm in the Red Sea, the wrecks of Subic Bay and Coron, in the Philippines, SS President Coolidge in Vanuatu and the "ghost fleet" of Truk Lagoon.

In the Encyclopedia of Recreational Diving, four "Meccas" of wreck diving are identified: (1) Truk Lagoon in Micronesia, (2) Scapa Flow in Orkney Islands, Scotland, (3) the Outer Banks of North Carolina (known as the "Graveyard of the Atlantic"), and (4) the Great Lakes.

For technical divers there are fewer wrecks that have attracted widespread popularity, although for years the SS Andrea Doria was regarded as the "Mount Everest" of wrecks to challenge the diver. However, since the popularisation of trimix as a breathing gas, technical divers now routinely dive much deeper and more challenging wrecks, and the Andrea Doria is argued by some to now be a good training wreck for trimix divers. Trimix can also be used to visit wrecks in Marlborough Sounds, New Zealand (MS Mikhail Lermontov), as well as in Brazil at Recife, and Fernando de Noronha (Corveta Ipiranga, where technical discovery diving is available).