It took two tries, a broken-down pump and a runaway anchor, but Alabama’s newest artificial reef is finally where it belongs: on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.
“No, but it’s down,” said Craig Newton, a biologist with the Alabama Marine Resources Division, when asked whether the sinking went smoothly.
A Rough Road to the Bottom
The New Venture, a former 250-foot research vessel, now sits on the Gulf floor about 20 miles south of Orange Beach, roughly two miles from where the LuLu was sunk back in May 2013. The LuLu went down on the first attempt. The New Venture did not.
Crews made their first attempt to sink the ship on June 20, but ran into trouble once the vessel was in position.
“The biggest problem was the pumps that were taken out there were not in good operating condition and didn’t keep them running,” Newton said. “Then we had to wait until we got another boat out there with some appropriate pumps, with pumps in good condition.”
While the crew waited for working equipment, the ship drifted off course.
“By that time the boat had drug its anchor outside of the reef zone,” Newton said. “Then we had to wait until a tug could make it out there and tow it back to the reef zone and to the reef site. Once we got that done we were able to sink it that day.”
An Unplanned Descent
Even once the sinking got underway, it didn’t go according to script. The original plan called for the stern of the ship to flood and hit bottom first, followed by the bow. Instead, the opposite happened.
“There were too many pipes connecting the forward and aft tanks, so we were unable to isolate where the water was going,” Newton said. “Everything essentially ended up draining toward the bow of the ship, resulting in the bow going down first.”
Despite the unplanned sequence, the ship settled the way reef managers had hoped.
“It still landed upright and is sitting on its keel,” Newton said. “There’s no notable list of the ship sitting on the bottom and the pilothouse is about 57 feet below the surface.”
Accessible to Divers, But Not an Easy Dive
At that depth, divers with even the lowest level of certification can explore the wreck. Still, conditions on the day of the sinking tested even the most experienced divers on hand to document it and retrieve cameras.
“The current was horrible,” Newton said. “We had a hard time just keeping our marker buoy on the ship for our divers to go down. It wasn’t for the novice diver. That’s part of diving in the Gulf.”
Despite the rough conditions, the effort paid off with usable footage.
“We’ve got some footage from inside the ship from GoPros that captured the flooding and they turned out real well,” Newton said.
The New Venture now rests at coordinates N29 54.052, W87 32.896, adding another destination to Alabama’s artificial reef zone, which state officials describe as the largest in the country.
More Reef Work Underway
The New Venture sinking is only one piece of a larger reef-building effort by the Alabama Marine Resources Division. The agency is also in the middle of deploying 600 pyramid-shaped reef structures in seven new reef zones stretching from Dauphin Island to Orange Beach, six to nine miles offshore.
“These are 10-feet tall concrete pyramids. So far we’ve got 100 of those pyramids out now and we should have another 100 of them put out probably Friday or Saturday of this week,” Newton said. “The construction schedule is getting out another 100 of these every other week.”