Roughly 11 miles off Charleston, a doomed schooner rests on the seafloor, a shipwreck that over the previous century quietly created a kaleidoscope of tropical sea life: corals, octopi and sponges. For the primary time, a School of Charleston marine biologist captured this hidden world in a single, beautiful picture.
The scientist, Phil Dustan, stated he and native diver Tom Robinson spent a day a number of years in the past swimming over the shipwreck of the Frederick W. Day, snapping images one second at a time. Then he spent months utilizing software program to sew greater than 1,200 photos collectively.
The result’s an uncommon overhead view of the schooner’s cargo — baggage of cement packed tight within the hull and collectively forming the form of a large cob of corn.
“It’s actually the one place regionally the place I dive,” Dustan stated of the wreck website. “It’s a tropical oasis in a sand plain.”
Frederick W. Day schooner. Courtesy of Maine Maritime Museum.
In its heyday, the Frederick W. Day was about 170 toes lengthy, a four-masted monument to the facility of crusing and its coming decline. In 1914, it set off from New York towards Wilmington, North Carolina, with giant baggage of powdered Portland cement in its maintain.
However off the Outer Banks, the ship collided with an unknown object and commenced taking up water. Excessive winds pushed the stricken schooner towards Charleston. However the pumps gave out, the seawater hit that powder cement, and the ship went down just like the concrete its cargo would ultimately turn into. The crew made it safely to shore in a lifeboat.
Time handed, and the shipwreck light from folks’s reminiscences. Nautical charts put it within the mistaken spot. Undisturbed and about 60 toes under the floor, an undersea world grew up on the surfaces and cracks of the hardening cement.
Within the early Nineteen Eighties, native divers, together with Tom Robinson, rediscovered the wreck and a shocking abundance of tropical life — an ecosystem you may see diving in Florida. There have been stony Oculina corals, puffer fish, amberjack, damselfish, Tiger sharks and manta rays. In 2015, Robinson informed The Publish and Courier that the reef “appeared like a Dr. Seuss image or the Beatles’ Octopus’s Backyard.”
A seize from video exhibits Dustan utilizing a digital camera to shoot 1000’s of images, which he stitched collectively utilizing pc software program.
Robinson in 2021 retired from his firm, Charleston Scuba, after an arsonist set fireplace to his store off Savannah Freeway. However he stays one of many wreck website’s most ardent defenders.
He and Dustan dove there a month in the past. The wreck website remains to be stunning, Robinson stated, “however it’s overfished.” He stated he didn’t see any spade fish, a striped species that was once considerable till spearfishing divers moved in.
He and Dustan have been pushing unsuccessfully for years to create a “no-take” zone or marine sanctuary however received pushback from fishing pursuits. “Spearfishing is a blood sport in the USA,” Robinson stated, including that tropical locations such because the Cayman Islands have discovered it of their financial self curiosity to put aside areas to guard sea life for eco-tours.
For now, Dustan stated he hopes the picture can lay the muse for future photographic excursions to the reef. In previous dives, he’s seen how hotter waters bleached corals on the Frederick W. Day simply as they’ve farther south. “I see it as local weather indicator,” he stated. Till then, he hopes the picture he and Robinson created opens folks’s eyes to a world hidden under the waves, one value defending.
A hooked fish, close to the positioning of a shipwreck carrying baggage of cement, 11 miles off the Charleston coast.
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