Diving for the wreck of it
A new LI scuba group fixes its focus on unexplored waters
BY BILL BLEYER
bill.bleyer@newsday.com

May 20, 2007

There are hundreds of shipwrecks in the Atlantic off Long Island, but scuba divers generally visit only a few dozen of them.

Diveboat captains tend to take paying customers to popular wrecks - ones with artifacts or lobsters - and avoid others where the visibility tends to be bad or that require a long boat trip out to deep water. But part of the reason is that many vessels known to have sunk off the Island never have been located.

A new local divers' group has been formed to try to change both factors.

Wrecksploration wants to encourage captains to look for new wrecks by getting them together with divers willing to pay for being in on the search.

"We do dive a lot of the same wrecks, weekend in, weekend out," said the group's founder and president, Adam Altman, a 39-year-old software developer from Holbrook. But he said his motivation wasn't boredom with familiar sites. Altman, who is also secretary of the Long Island Divers Association, said it was more of a question of the thrill of exploring new sites.

Exciting diving

"If you've ever done an exploration, it's one of the more exciting things you can do in diving," he said. "Whether it's a wreck or not, just getting geared up on the boat knowing that you're going down on something, and you don't know what you're going to find down there - it could be a barge, it could be a pile of rocks ... you never know - it's a thrill."

Looking for uncharted wrecks, he said, "expands our opportunities for diving. Treasurer Russ Lusterman, 50, an accountant from Baldwin, added that "exploration is really good for the dive industry," providing financial support for boats and shops. "People will make an effort to go out for something like that," he said.

Altman began bouncing his idea off other divers and people from the industry over the past few years, got positive feedback and enlisted Long Island Divers Association vice president Randi Eisen, a 49-year-old cell biology researcher from Woodmere, to help create the group in December.

They attracted 24 members - dues for divers are $20 and $10 for others who want to support the group or help with the historical research - before the first public program May 3 at Nassau University Medical Center, which attracted almost 100 divers and maritime history buffs.

Dan Berg, an author and owner of the diveboat Wreck Valley, who spoke at the event, said, "The group is a great idea because it piques the interest in local shipwreck diving. It will be very exciting not only for the dive community but also for the maritime history community in general."

Altman said artifacts, fish and lobsters have become scarcer on the popular sites. "All of these things are more plentiful on a wreck that's not known. "Almost every captain out there has numbers: there's something that they'll run over on the way to a dive site, and they'll see a spike on their depthfinders, and they'll stop to investigate it or make a note of it. Or they have numbers they got from fishermen - their secret fishing spots."

Plumbing captains' secrets

So the group expects to work with captains to plan two trips a month starting next month that will explore some of those GPS locations, with the divers paying the way. The captains are expected to keep those secret numbers to themselves. "Captains are very closed-mouthed with their numbers," Altman noted.

But other details of what is found will be posted on the group's Web site: www.wrecks ploration.org. Once a wreck is located, the divers and non-diving history buffs will research it and survey the site - calling in marine archaeologists if the wreck turns out to be very old or rare.

As to what they might find, Altman said, "Everything. From 17th century trade ships carrying cargo to pirate ships, several wrecks from World War II that have never been found, tons of work boats from the '60s and on, probably more barges than you can count, tug boats, fishing boats."

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