USS Oriskany

Pensacola · Florida · United States

The USS Oriskany lies on the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico roughly 35 kilometres south of Pensacola, Florida, a 270-metre Essex-class aircraft carrier deliberately sunk in 2006 to create the world's largest artificial reef. The Navy called the project the Great Carrier Reef, and nearly two decades later the name has proved prophetic. This massive warship, which launched jets during the Korean and Vietnam Wars, has been completely transformed by marine life into a living reef of extraordinary proportions. The boat ride from Pensacola takes about an hour, and the first hint of the wreck is your dive computer showing the bottom rising from 60-plus metres to 20 metres as the superstructure appears on the sonar. I rolled backwards into warm Gulf water and began my descent. The sheer scale of the Oriskany is the first thing that overwhelms. This is not a fishing trawler or a tugboat. It is an aircraft carrier, and even at twenty metres visibility, the structure extends beyond sight in every direction. The island superstructure, where the ship's command bridge once directed flight operations, now rises to within 20 metres of the surface. Its radar masts and antenna arrays are thickly encrusted with soft corals, hydroids, and sponges, while enormous schools of Atlantic spadefish, numbering in the hundreds, wheel around the structure in hypnotic formations. Great amberjack, powerful silver predators each over a metre long, patrol the upper levels in aggressive packs. Descending to the flight deck at 24 metres, the wooden planking is long gone, leaving steel frameworks that form an intricate lattice of swim-throughs and openings. Goliath groupers, some exceeding 150 kilograms, have made the deck their domain. They hover in the openings with a placid authority that belies their enormous size. Red snapper and triggerfish crowd every horizontal surface, and great barracuda hang motionless in the water column, their silver bodies reflecting the filtered Gulf light. The hangar deck openings at around 40 metres beckon the deeper-rated diver into cavernous internal spaces where the carrier's aircraft once parked wingtip to wingtip.