C-58 Wreck

You descend a line into blue water and the hull comes up underneath you at around twenty metres, lying slightly over with the deck sloping away. Seventy metres of ship is more than one dive at this depth, so most guides pick an end and work it rather than trying to swim the length.

The interesting part is the damage. The wreck is in two main pieces, and the gap between them is where the light gets in: torn plate, broken frames, and openings that were never designed to be there. Barracuda hang in the current above the structure, green morays hold in the broken sections, and through the winter spotted eagle rays come past in numbers, which is the single best reason to dive it between November and April.

Current is usually running. That makes it a dive you do on the line, in a group, with a plan agreed on the boat rather than worked out at depth.

She was laid down at Willamette Iron and Steel in Portland, Oregon in August 1943 and launched on 3 June 1944, sponsored by Mrs. Mary M. Doig, "whose husband and son were reported missing in action and who also had another son, a brother, and nine nephews in the Navy" 1.

She was commissioned USS Harlequin on 31 August 1945, two weeks after the war she was built for had ended. She did a shakedown off California, sailed to New Orleans and then Texas, and was decommissioned in May 1946 after about nine months in commission. She never reached a war zone.

Reclassified in 1955 and struck from the Navy list in 1962, she was sold to Mexico and served far longer under a Mexican flag than an American one: as ARM DM-20, then converted to an oceanographic research vessel, then as ARM General Pedro María Anaya. She was sunk off Cancún in 2000 to make artificial reef.

Her sister ship, the C-55, lies nearby and had the opposite career: she fought at Okinawa and earned three battle stars. The two are dived together.

This is not a first wreck. It sits at around twenty-five metres, which is past what an Open Water course trains for, and centres differ on whether they will take an experienced Open Water diver here on a no-penetration pass. Settle that when you book rather than on the boat.

If you are offered penetration, understand what you are being offered. Hurricanes broke this hull in 2004 and again in 2005, and nobody has published a structural assessment since. The openings are storm damage, not designed access. That is overhead diving, and it wants the training and the reel that overhead diving wants.

The wreck is usually sold with the C-55 as a single two-wreck outing, so expect the day to be built around both rather than around this one.