Visited the same wreck 3 years apart. Night and day difference.

Went back to a wreck I last dove in 2021 near Port Macquarie. The hull was covered in soft corals back then. This time? Zero growth. Bare metal everywhere. Some local fishermen told me a big storm shifted the sand bottom around. Buried the whole lower section. The current patterns changed too. Has anyone else seen wrecks recover or degrade that fast?

2 comments

2 Comments

susanh4619d ago

Buried the whole lower section" - yeah, that'll do it. I had a similar thing happen off the coast of Sydney a few years back. There was this old tugboat wreck I dove maybe once a year for a while. It was always covered in sponges and little gorgonians. Then one season a big storm came through, shifted the sand dune on the bottom, and half the wreck just vanished under the sand. The next year a different storm uncovered it again, but everything on it was dead or scraped off. It took like four years for the soft corals to even start coming back. So yeah, wrecks can change that fast, but they can also recover just as quick if the conditions settle. The key is if the sand stabilizes and the current brings back larvae. If it stays shifted around, you might get nothing but bare metal for ages.

noahchen19d ago

Fair point, but I've seen sanded wrecks stay dead for way longer than that.