We Missed the Wreck — And Found the Best Part | The Denver Diver
A strong current changed our C-58 wreck dive off Cancun. Here’s what we found at the broken bow and why I’d return to explore the other half.
Diving the broken C-58 wreck off Cancun, Mexico. For a while, it looked like this dive wasn’t going to happen at all. The swell was big. The current was ripping. And somewhere beneath all that moving water was a submerged buoy marking where we were supposed to drop onto C-58. We couldn’t find it. We were diving with Alfredo from Deep Life, circling and searching while the boat pitched in the swell. There comes a point when you start wondering whether the ocean is making the decision for you. We were getting close. Then the captain found the buoy. It was stretched hard against the current. That was it. We called it. We were going. And we knew we’d need to get down fast. Then We Missed the Wreck We dropped quickly. We’d even added a little extra weight to help us get down through the moving water. It didn’t matter. The current grabbed us during the descent and carried us right past our planned landing zone. C-58 is broken into two major pieces, and the normal descent puts divers on the larger stern section of the wreck. That’s where we were supposed to go. We weren’t going there anymore. Once we were down, the current was simply too strong to fight our way back. So we stopped trying. And that’s when a dive that had already gone off-plan got really interesting. We settled at about 79 feet, between the two broken sections of the ship. Down-current from us was the smaller section. The bow. That became our dive. A Ship a Hurricane Tore in Half C-58 began life as the USS Harlequin (AM-365), an Admirable-class minesweeper built for the U.S. Navy during World War II. She was commissioned on August 31, 1945, just as the war was ending, and was decommissioned the following year. In 1962, the ship was sold to Mexico. Over the decades that followed, she served the Mexican Navy under several names and in several roles, including as an oceanographic research vessel and eventually ARM General Pedro María Anaya — the name most associated with the wreck divers now call C-58. She was eventually intentionally sunk off Cancun to become an artificial reef. Then Hurricane Wilma arrived. In October 2005, Wilma hammered the Yucatán Peninsula as an extraordinarily powerful hurricane. C-58 didn’t survive intact. The storm tore the ship apart near the middle, leaving the bow and stern separated on the seafloor. What a hurricane destroyed, though, created an incredible wreck dive. And through pure accident, we’d landed at the broken end most divers weren’t aiming for. The Bow Was Lying on Its Side The foredeck rests on its port — left — side. That orientation takes your brain a minute to process. Ships are supposed to have floors below you, walls beside you and ceilings above you. Now take the entire thing and rotate it 90 degrees. That’s what we were looking at. We approached from the broken middle of the ship, with the bow stretching away from us on its side. There was a large opening on what had originally been the top deck. Now it was on our right. That’s where we went in. Inside C-58 We entered through the opening in the top of the ship and turned right. Now we were swimming through a ship that was lying sideways. The wall of the vessel had effectively become the floor beneath us. That made the penetration feel completely different from C-56. C-56 had felt like exploring an intact ship. C-58 felt like exploring the aftermath of something. You could see what Hurricane Wilma had done. We followed the interior along the side of the ship toward the torn-open middle. And then the wreck simply opened up. The broken midsection was enormous. We swam out through the place where a 184-foot ship had literally been ripped apart. That’s the part of the dive I keep thinking about. We hadn’t made the landing we’d planned. We hadn’t reached the section we were supposed to dive. And somehow we’d ended up inside the broken bow of a WWII-era minesweeper, swimming toward the opening where a hurricane tore the ship in half. I’m okay with that trade. Back Into the Current After exiting through the broken middle, we worked our way back toward the foredeck. Then we began slowly rising along the side of the wreck, eventually coming up to around 65 feet. The current hadn’t gotten any friendlier. A school of amberjack was holding position in it, facing directly into the moving water. Divers were doing essentially the same thing. There was a line above the wreck, and everyone grabbed on. Without it, we would have been gone. So there we were — divers hanging onto a rope in the current while a school of amberjack hovered nearby doing effortlessly what we were working pretty hard to accomplish. And then the barracuda showed up. Not a little one. A giant barracuda came in toward the amberjack. The entire mood changed. One moment the water was full of fish holding in the current. Then the predator arrived. And the water cleared. Fast. The barracuda wasn’t interested in us. It had come hunting. Watching that happen while hanging onto a line above a shipwreck in a ripping current was a pretty good reminder that we were visitors in somebody else’s world. This Wasn’t a Pretty Caribbean Dive Visibility that day was only around 50 feet. The current was strong. The surface was rough. We missed our planned descent. We couldn’t reach the primary section of the wreck. By almost any conventional measure, things had not gone according to plan. And I loved the dive. Maybe that’s because some of the dives I remember best aren’t the ones where everything works perfectly. They’re the ones where the plan disappears and everybody underwater adapts. We didn’t fight the current trying to rescue the dive we’d intended to have. We dove the wreck the ocean gave us. And it gave us the bow. The Part Most Divers Don’t See I didn’t realize until afterward how lucky that actually was. The primary descent for C-58 is normally on the stern — the larger, more frequently dived portion of the wreck. The bow sits roughly 300 feet down-current, lying on its port side. It’s visited less often. That’s exactly where the current deposited us. We thought we’d missed the wreck. In reality, we’d missed the planned wreck. There’s a difference. Would I Dive C-58 Again? Absolutely. But I’d also like to dive the other half. That’s part of what makes C-58 so interesting: we can go back and essentially have a different wreck dive at the same site. And Alfredo gave us another reason. He told us that when we return in December, this area can be filled with spotted eagle rays. Winter is their season around the Cancun wrecks, and they frequently use the current around C-58. So apparently we’re not finished here. Next time I’d love to hit the stern. I’d love another look inside the wreck. I’d really love to see the eagle rays. But I’ll never complain about missing our original landing zone. Because sometimes you miss the wreck you’re looking for - and find the best part.
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