Scuba diving on shipwrecks has been around since people started diving beneath the sea. Shipwrecks offer a certain amount of mystery and lure and are invariably equated to sunken treasure. Diving on a sunken ship brings questions like: Where did the wreck come from? Did the people parish when this ship sank? What caused the wreck to sink? What’s inside the wreck? Whether the ship sank due to bad weather, navigational error, a wartime battle, or if it was sunk purposefully as an artificial reef, the lure of exploring a sunken ship is often intoxicating. Diving wrecks allows you to examine history and share an exhilarating experience with friends. Wrecks also are usually abundant with marine life of all kinds, and wrecks in cold, fresh water, such as the Great Lakes, are often well preserved.

Photos y: Steve Straatsma

There are basically two ways to explore wrecks: by exploring the exterior of the wreck or by exploring the interior of the wreck (penetrating the wreck). Exploring the exterior of the wreck is the easiest and most common way of exploring a wreck. When swimming around the exterior of the wreck, you can see the deck, bow, stern, propeller, hull, pipes, deck equipment, external stairways and hallways, exhaust stacks, etc. In addition to the wreck itself, large quantities of marine life also hang out around wrecks, turning it into an artificial reef. Diving around the outside of a wreck requires no special training or equipment, as long as they are in recreational diving limits. However, a number of training agencies offer basic wreck diving education/certification. There are some hazards when exploring outside a wreck, such as disorientation, sharp metal edges or objects, and entanglement hazards created by rigging, nets, and fishing line. Diving around the exterior of a wreck is alluring and mystical and often leads to the desire to “find our what’s inside.”

Exploring the interior of a wreck allows you to penetrate the wreck for the purpose of examining and exploring the rooms, hallways, and layout of the inside of the ship. When you enter a wreck, you enter an “overhead” environment, meaning that there is no way to return directly to the surface. Exploring the interior of a shipwreck is both alluring and can be very dangerous. Whether looking for artifacts or trying to find the engine room, penetrating a wreck, no matter what the depth, is an advanced form of diving, similar to cave diving. This type of wreck diving requires special equipment and training because getting lost is a real possibility if you don’t know what you’re doing.

In some areas, wreck diving is more popular than any other type of diving. Places like the Great Lakes, Atlantic coast, and Truck Lagoon are all very popular wreck diving locations. Each of these areas offer very different types of wreck diving, not because the wrecks themselves are so different, but because the environment, such as depth, visibility, and conditions can be drastically different. The majority of wreck diving areas have laws to protect the wrecks and have different rules for diving them. There are also variations with the techniques used to dive these wrecks from area to area. Local knowledge from dive shops and avid divers can help you to avoid difficulties. Many of these places offer guided dives from dive leaders who know the area and the wrecks extremely well.