The famed ocean liner SS United States, which took presidents and celebrities across the Atlantic voyages in high-class style, will find new popularity after it sinks beneath the Gulf surface today and becomes the world’s largest artificial reef – and a Mount Everest-type destination for scuba divers to explore.
The 990-foot-long ship is being carefully flooded with seawater, which will take the ship down nearly 200 feet to its final resting place.
Soon, scuba divers – the curious, the bucket-listers and the passionate enthusiasts – will start to descend in droves to visit the ship, sitting upright on the Gulf floor.
“We anticipate the SS United States is going to be super popular,” said Savanna Christy, owner and instructor at ScubaTech, a dive center in Destin, Florida.
What’s the Attraction in Scuba Diving?
“What draws me to scuba diving is being able to be underwater and experience marine life,” said Christy, who’s been a diver for 22 years.
“It’s the sense of peace and tranquility that comes with that weightless feeling,” she said. “For some, it’s the adventure, the thrill, but I would say experiencing the underwater world is not something you get every day.”
There were about 2.5 million active scuba divers in the U.S. in 2024, according to DEMA, a dive marketing organization. Active divers are those who went diving at least once in the past 12 months.
What Draws Divers to Sites Like the SS United States?
Divers are keen to see the ocean liner itself, of course, a fabled part of classic maritime lore – its elegance, speed, celebrities and parties long gone – reduced to a ghost of its past, sitting silently beneath the Gulf waves.
“Those who are eager to dive immediately are there for the historical factor,” Christy said. “There’s something really cool about a wreck when it’s first gone down, before it attracts any marine growth.”
“It’s adventure,” said Jennifer Adams, director of tourism for Okaloosa County. “Our waters are so clear and you can see not only that you’re around the reefs, but the wildlife that is around the reefs as well.”
But that’s not all.
“Here in this north part of the Florida Gulf, we have a shipwreck trail,” Christy said. There are nine ships within the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “People come, they get a passport that they can stamp off when they dive certain wrecks. This is going to be part of that.”
“We’ve been growing our artificial reef program for the past five years,” Adams said. “Everybody comes here for the beaches, but we’re now seeing that people want to be in the water.”
The new reef “will give multi-experienced divers some diversity,” Adams said. “Not everybody’s going to go 180 feet down, we know that. Our dive operators are also focusing on that 40- to 50-feet-deep threshold and getting new people comfortable.”
What Else Will Divers See?
Once submerged, the SS United States will be the largest artificial reef in the world. The second-largest, the USS Oriskany, won’t be far away.
“We’re going to be working with Pensacola in Escambia County, because we’ll have the two largest artificial reefs in the world,” Adams said. The ships will be about 13 nautical miles apart. “You could conceivably dive both of them on a daylong trip, unless you’re going to be doing the deep dive, which is going to take a lot longer.”
In addition to the submerged ship, divers will see a variety of aquatic life, which will quickly move onto the ship.
“Marine life will quickly start to gravitate to the wreck and start living there,” Christy said. “We’ll have fish that are important to our commercial fisheries – snappers, groupers, Amberjack, things like that. You’ll see sharks and turtles and small reef fish.
“You’ll get crustaceans, crabs and shrimp,” Christy said, “You’ll see different things that will live and grow on the marine life that adheres to the wreck surface. It’s going to be an entire ecosystem.”
Will Divers Need Special Training to Visit the Ship?
The SS United States will sit in water that’s 180-200 feet deep. With its funnels, radar mast and other deck structures removed, “the top of it will be in 55 to 60 feet of water,” said Alex Fogg, Okaloosa County’s chief of natural resources.
“A lot of those top decks are going to be easily accessible to the beginner diver and novice diver,” he said. “Technical divers who want to go down and see what the bottom looks like can go down there.”
“There’s probably going to be plenty of cave divers and other penetration divers who are going to be exploring the inside of the ship, going down to the engine room, going to the pool, and other places like that,” Fogg said. “But that’s not something a recreational novice diver is going to be able to tackle.”
That means divers should have – at minimum – something called Open Water Diver certification to see the top portion of the ship.
Training for more advanced certifications is available and will allow divers to go deeper and see more of the ship, even the interior, with supervision. For safety, divers usually go in pairs or in a group with an instructor or dive guide.
How Long Can Scuba Divers Stay Down?
Most recreational divers breathe compressed air with an oxygen concentration of 20% to 22% from a scuba tank or cylinder. Some use specialized gas mixtures such as nitrox.
A typical recreational scuba dive lasts 45 to 60 minutes, though duration varies depending on depth, exertion, breathing rate and tank capacity.
Those factors affect how quickly a diver consumes breathing gas, according to the Divers Alert Network, a nonprofit organization specializing in scuba-diving safety and medicine.
Dive durations are limited by gas supply. But there’s also the no-decompression limit, “the maximum time a diver can stay at a given depth before needing mandatory decompression stops” on the way back to the surface, says divingstandard.com.
Different depths require different times. For example, a diver 130 feet below the waves could spend 10 minutes at that depth before decompression stops would be required to ascend to the surface. That’s according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a commercial-diving table by the Code of Federal Regulations.
Don’t Even Think About Taking Dive Souvenirs
The code of conduct for diving on ships can be summed up as: “Take only photos, leave only bubbles.”
That’s “pretty standard across the board,” Christy said. “No matter where we’re diving, it’s our code as stewards of the ocean.”
Florida law states that those who remove or attempt to remove an object can be charged with a first-degree misdemeanor, with a penalty of up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine. Those who dig up items face a third-degree felony, punishable by five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.
The rules stand even though there won’t be anything on the SS United States that can be removed. “This is a project that’s undergone a lot of preparation,” Christy said. “There’s nothing left behind that divers could pick up and put in their pockets, so to speak.”
Source: USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Reuters; Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Scuba Diving International; padi.com; roatandivers.com; scubadiving.com; dema.org; SS United States Conservancy; Environmental Protection Agency
Reporting by George Petras, Stephen J. Beard and Jennifer Borresen, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
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