Felipe Xicoténcatl (C-53)

The boat ties in. That one detail sets this dive apart from everything else here, where the routine is a back roll into moving water and a pickup somewhere north of where you started. Here you have an address to swim to, and you get to it down a mooring line made fast to the bow or the stern1. On a clear day the ship is already visible from the surface, 56 metres of her, with the top of the wheelhouse at about 13 m and the sand at 242.

The usual tour runs the outside first, bow to stern. The bow is thickly encrusted, the guns are still on their mounts amidships, the depth charges are still on the stern, and the last few metres take you down to the propellers on the sand, which is the deepest you will be all dive. The hull number is still readable on her side1.

If you go inside, you go in through openings that were cut for divers before she was sunk. The through routes are bright and the compartments are dark, and the dark ones are where the animals are: glassy sweepers packed into a corridor, the resident green moray in a space the experienced guides swim straight to. Most groups take the wheelhouse, then the corridors, the engine room with the engines still sitting in their beds, and the galley.

Silt is what changes this dive. Twenty-five years of it has settled into the lower compartments and a flutter kick will lift the lot. Frog kick, or stay outside. The other thing that catches people is gas. Surface current can run hard while the water around the hull is soft, so the descent is work and the dive is not, and at 24 m with this much to look at the gauge moves faster than divers expect.

Cozumel sells one verb. You back roll, the current takes you, and you fly a reef for fifty minutes. The C-53 is the one dive on the island where the water is asked to hold still, and that change of rhythm is a large part of why divers pick it.

She is also the only ship here. If you want a wreck on this island this is it, and the alternative is a pair of six-metre patrol boats lying off a town beach at the north end. That scarcity is not the whole appeal, though. Almost nothing on a Caribbean reef can be checked against a government register, and this hull can.

Life has had twenty-five years to move in. Sponges and encrusting growth cover the plate, grunts and yellowtail snapper hang off the structure, black grouper and cubera snapper hold particular sections of hull as if they had addresses, and spiny lobsters clump under the walkways in numbers that surprise people. Garden eels stand out of the sand around her. It is not a coral reef and it does not pretend to be one. It is steel on a bare sandbank, and everything on it arrived after 2000.

This is also where a lot of divers find out whether they like being inside a ship. First wreck dives happen here constantly, and so do the decisions, made on the boat or at the opening, to stay outside this time.

She was laid down as USS Scuffle on 4 May 1943 at Winslow Marine Railway and Shipbuilding in Seattle, launched that August and commissioned on 2 May 1944, an Admirable-class fleet minesweeper of 184 feet 6 inches with a complement of 10434.

She swept ahead of the Lingayen Gulf landings in January 1945, then Zambales and Subic Bay. Working off Corregidor on 14 February the minesweepers came within 5,000 yards of the island and were repeatedly straddled by Japanese fire before supporting ships silenced the guns. Ten days later she went back into Manila Bay, and by 10 April the sweep had cleared 615 square miles of water and reopened the harbour. Brunei Bay came in June, where she grounded on a reef, damaged a screw and finished her sweeps anyway. Then Balikpapan, three typhoons on the way to Sasebo, and Japanese minefields in the Tsushima Strait. She earned five battle stars3.

She reached Orange, Texas in April 1946 and was decommissioned there that June. Sixteen years in reserve followed. She was struck from the US Navy list on 1 May 1962 and transferred to Mexico on 1 October3, and by the 1990s she carried the name General Felipe Xicoténcatl and the number C-534.

In June 2000 she was put on the bottom off Chankanaab. The sandbank was chosen so that she would crush no reef, and she was stripped of hazards, cut open, weighted with concrete blocks and chained down against storms. President Ernesto Zedillo was there1. The project was run by the island's watersports and tourism association with the local dive shops and the marine park5. She was not a one-off either: the same federal authorisation covered three hulls, and the other two went to Veracruz and Cancun5. That programme, not a shared name, is the real connection between this wreck and the C-58 off Cancun.

One thing is reported to have moved her since. Hurricane Wilma crossed this coast in October 2005, the storm that stripped reefs from Cancun to Cozumel and took the crucifix-shaped sponge formation out of the Cathedral cavern at Punta Sur, and accounts describe the C-53 being pushed about 30 m north while staying upright. She is intact bow to stern today.

No legend attaches to her.

Confirm the wreck is on the plan before you pay for the day. Boats here settle their sites by agreement in the morning, and the C-53 goes on the list when conditions, group and routing allow, so a diver who came to Cozumel for this dive should say so in advance.

A light is not optional inside, and every operator on the island says the same thing about it. Carry a backup if you own one. The one equipment failure divers report on this wreck is a primary light flooding at depth.

Understand what the interior actually is before you follow someone through an opening. No agency rule and no park rule gates entry, published operator requirements disagree with each other, and the guide decides on the day. Divers who dive here regularly say the practice is looser than any of the published policies. Whatever a boat allows, the sand here is at 24 m, deeper than an Open Water card covers, the compartments go dark, and the decision to swim into an overhead is yours.

Gloves are prohibited everywhere in the marine park, which matters more on a steel wreck than on a reef. Fire coral grows on the hull and lionfish shelter inside her, so keep your trim and stay off the hull.

Operators split on whether she belongs on the first tank or the second. At 24 m she sits between the island's usual deep-first, shallow-second pair, so either order works, and the choice comes down to how much bottom time the group wants.