Diving the Wreck

A valiant aircraft carrier, the USS Oriskany, begins a new life off the coast of Pensacola as the world's largest artificial reef.

Bucky McMahon
photography by Tim Calver

SweetTea Journal (Spring/Summer 2008) – When the Old Testament God wanted to impress Job, He showed off his Leviathan. For purposes of astonishment, the Mighty O would’ve worked just as well.

Behold the aircraft carrier, which maketh the deep to boil!

No man made her; rather, she arises from a spirit that lives and moves in nations. The highest expertise of war and peace, of wing and sail, combines to form the most daunting machine on earth, an aircraft carrier. A mobile town of thousands, each ship possesses its own unique culture, its singular aura of lives lived on the edge of precision and chaos. So when her cruising time is done—and more than 30,000 tons of steel come crashing down onto the ocean floor—it’s no surprise that her magnetism continues from the depths below.

Although the United States Navy previously has sunk decommissioned carriers in deep ocean waters, the USS Oriskany is the world’s first aircraft carrier deliberately sunk as an artificial reef—and in reach of recreational divers. 

The irresistible attraction of the 911-foot Mighty O has brought our group of sixteen divers together aboard the H2O Below. Our captain, Douglas Hammock, was in the flotilla of some 700 boats to witness the historic scuttling. “The navy had established a safety perimeter of one mile,” Captain Douglas says, his twang cutting through the rumble of the engine. “And that was close enough!”

At 10:25 a.m. on May 17, 2006, a Navy ordnance team pushed the button detonating 500 pounds of strategically placed C-4 explosives. The blast sent debris flying skyward above the ship’s island tower, and clouds of white smoke billowed over the flight deck. Thirty-six minutes later, the Mighty O disappeared beneath the surface. Thanks to meticulous planning—and four 75,000-pound anchors—she settled upright on the bottom in 212 feet of water, the blunt-nosed prow of the “Great Carrier Reef” (as CNN dubbed it) pointed north toward Pensacola, the city on the Gulf known as the “Cradle of Naval Aviation.”

Whether you’re a serious wreck diver, or just a curious “rec” diver, sooner or later you’re bound to book a trip to the Mighty O. She’s just too big a blip on the dive radar to ignore and, as a habitat for marine life, is bound to get better every year. It’s a 24-mile boat ride to get to her—everybody in the fishing and diving business wanted something closer, but she was too big—a little more than an hour of cruising on this bright, calm morning in July.

That’s plenty of time to get to know fellow divers, which, on this lucky day, includes a crack team of deep-water videographers shooting footage for Quest for Sunken Warships, a Military Channel series. They’ll be using high-tech rebreathers and underwater scooters to deal with the depth and length of the wreck. At the other end of the experience spectrum is novice diver Will Jennings, who soon discovers that Lisa and Rick, a married couple and avid divers both, live just down the road from him in Colorado. Rick had come to Pensacola for business, but when Lisa heard he was going to be diving the Mighty O, she insisted on flying down to join him. “You just don’t pass up a chance to dive on an aircraft carrier,” she says.
Exactly.

Casting about for a dive buddy, I meet Russ Nolan, a fifty-something former navy pilot. Back in the 1970s, he flew A-7 Corsair IIs off the aircraft carrier USS Lexington, the Oriskany’s sister ship. Nolan is a wealth of information about carrier life and lore. With a little polite pestering on my part, he divulges the CliffsNotes of a few of his close calls, like the time he brought in his A-7 with its engine spitting out parts. Or when he flew blind at night, experiencing vertigo, about to blow chow, convinced he was upside down, although his instruments told him he was right-side up. And all this happening at a roaring Mach 1, the carrier deck like a postage stamp below him. Engrossed by these tales, I’m startled by the sudden silence. The captain has cut the engine, and we’re gently bobbing on the blue, no land in sight, the Mighty O directly beneath us.
“Listen up, y’all,” Captain Douglas says, and then he lays down a few rules.

It’s about 70 feet down to the top of the island, the complex observation and command structure that rises above the flight deck, where a diving crew member has already secured the H2O Below’s mooring line. The flight deck is approximately 137 feet below the surface, a no-go depth for recreational diving. “And nothing to see there anyway but a bunch of scallop shells,” the captain tells us. (Still, one would like to tag it, and no doubt many do.) Also, we’re required to bring back a minimum cushion of 500 pounds per square inch in our tanks, or we’ll forfeit our second dive. Them’s the rules, and considering how far we are from medical assistance, they’re quite reasonable policies. To start the dive, it’s just a giant stride off the transom, and follow that line down to the carrier. You can’t miss it.

It’s true—the top of the island looms into view almost at once. We’ve got a good 60 feet or more of visibility today, the late-morning sun shooting spears of bright light as far down as the truncated top of the tower, which has been shorn of its topmost bristle of radar antennae. With the water a balmy eighty degrees, there is a dreamlike quality to the slow descent, falling story after story down the starboard side. Already, a little more than a year since the sinking, the ship’s painted gray has taken on the muted olive and umber tones of algal growth, a slight fuzziness that hasn’t yet obscured her hard angles or her near-obsessive complexity. For the uninitiated such as myself, the stacked boxes have the qualities of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, the function-driven architecture—everything absolutely necessary for something, but only an expert could guess what.

I’m following Nolan, who understands what we’re seeing. But the steel beach was never his world, either. As a pilot, he spent most of his time (when not flying) down in the massive hangar bay (or “barn”), now at 160 feet deep, or in quarters, deeper still, now an almost unimaginable maze of flooded corridors and tiny pitch-dark rooms. “The highest I ever got was the primary flight control room,” Nolan tells me. “And that only once, to concur with the skipper that taking off in 25-foot seas was a bad idea.”

So on this checkout dive we’re circling the structure, looking into narrow doorways and small glassless windows, keeping an eye out for octopuses, cubbyhole lovers that were some of the earliest settlers of the wreck. For all her bulk, there’s a parsimony of space on a carrier that reminds me of the Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, tailored to the short, sturdy Spaniards of the sixteenth century. Aboard the Mighty O a tall man would have to do a lot of ducking, or suffer many a bump on the head. Finally our spiraling ascent brings us back to the starboard peak of the island, and to a jutting spar flying the American flag. Below this is a navy-blue banner honoring the missing in action (MIA) of the Vietnam War, a sudden jolting reminder of the ship’s martial past.

Among the throng of witnesses that morning in May 2006, when the Oriskany metamorphosed from warship to reef in a matter of minutes, was Pensacola resident Art Giberson, a photographer and naval historian who served two combat missions aboard the carrier. His was a privileged view aboard the Associated Press boat, sighting through a long telephoto lens. For Giberson, a former chief photographer’s mate, the sinking was an emotional experience—and a startling one, too. “It was supposed to take four to six hours,” he tells me in a phone interview. “Thirty-six minutes was a bit disconcerting for us vets.” Mostly though, the entire event, from the memorial service for former crew members at Pensacola’s National Museum of Naval Aviation on May 13 to the final moments as the Oriskany’s bow slipped beneath the waves, brings the story full circle—from warrior to artificial reef. Giberson’s concise history, The Mighty O, acknowledges that arc.

In his book, Giberson writes with contagious affection for the ship, pointing out her many firsts: first aircraft carrier to receive an automatic steering system, with gyroscopes and a single console; first of its class to receive steam catapults; first to sail from the Atlantic to the Pacific around Cape Horn before traveling to Korea and her first taste of combat. Although commissioned in 1950 as an Essex-class carrier, the Oriskany’s many modifications made her one of a kind. Between Korea and Vietnam, the Mighty O enjoyed her Hollywood period, starring in The Bridges at Toko-Ri and The Men of the Fighting Lady. In 1959, she acquired her angled flight deck, aluminum now instead of wood, and her powerful steam catapults. Thus equipped as a “super” carrier, she was ready for a most arduous role as a founding member of the “Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club,” the tongue-in-cheek honorific for ships in Vietnam that met hard times in harm’s way.

In total, the Mighty O served two and half years in combat from 1965 to 1975, mostly at the Yankee Station gun line off the coast of North Vietnam. As the conflict escalated, the pace of shipboard life became more frenetic, with fighters taking off and landing around the clock—until the almost inevitable catastrophe occurred. In Giberson’s account, the deadly fire of October 26, 1966, was the result of fatigue more than anything else. A very young and exhausted crewman was hard at work storing munitions when he accidentally pulled the ignition lanyard of a parachute flare. Hoping to contain the two-million candlepower fireworks, he tossed the flare into the storage locker among other stacked munitions and shut the door. The plan didn’t work. By the time the flames were extinguished, the death toll had climbed to forty-four, including twenty-four pilots.

Even more dangerous duty lay ahead. With the lifting of target restrictions during the Oriskany’s third deployment to Vietnam in 1967, the carrier’s pilots were exposed to greater risks. Hanoi had beefed up its defenses, launching numerous surface-to-air missiles or SAMs (pilots called them “flying telephone poles”), with deadly effect. Future senator and presidential candidate John McCain, having survived the shipboard fire that killed 134 seamen on the carrier USS Forrestal, had transferred to the Oriskany to continue flying sorties against the enemy. He became one of 18 Oriskany pilots to be shot down over North Vietnam and held captive. By the end of her seventh combat deployment in Vietnam, the Oriskany had lost 109 aircraft and had suffered 81 fatalities and 18 captured, with 5 of those MIAs.

Bloodied but unbowed, the Mighty O was decommissioned in 1976. So began a long period in limbo, during which she nearly ended up as a tourist attraction in Japan (a proposal quashed by vigorous protests from veterans), and was towed to Texas to be scrapped (those plans fell through). The navy recognized her potential as an artificial reef, and parties in South Florida and in the Panhandle’s Escambia County, as well as in other coastal states, expressed an interest. In the resulting political tug-of-war, Escambia County held the trump card—its history and tradition as the “Cradle of Naval Aviation,” plus many highly influential retired naval aviators in residence. The actual reefing of the carrier was an immense task. Under the tireless supervision of Escambia County’s marine resources manager, Robert Turpin, the Mighty O achieved another first: first deliberately scuttled naval warship to meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s exacting cleanup standards—at a cost of $13.29 million.

Of course, the final “first” of this storied ship, her rebirth as a reef, has been a huge boon to the Panhandle’s hurricane-beleaguered dive charter business. Every day—weather permitting—boats from Mobile, Alabama, to Destin and all points in between set course for the Mighty O. “The dive charters have seen a tremendous increase in bookings,” says Keith Wilkins, director of Escambia County’s Neighborhood and Environmental Services Department. “They’ve basically doubled—in some cases tripled—their business. And it’s attracting divers from all over the world.”

Aboard the H2O Below, we can see the boost with our own eyes. While we munch crackers and guzzle water during our surface interval between dives, several more boats arrive, creating a mini-flotilla of dive charters and lending this otherwise blank patch of open water a downright festive air. Meanwhile, there’s no sign of the über-divers filming for the Military Channel. Soon we gear up again and head aft for the second dive, this time with a better sense of what to expect and where to go, although Fritz Sharar, owner of MBT Divers (the shop that booked my charter), says it takes at least a dozen dives to really learn your way around the island structure. What strikes Sharar most about the sinking has been its effect on Oriskany vets. “The old-timers have really come out of the woodwork to dive it.” And he’s received some truly touching commissions from nondiving veterans or their families, who want personal effects such as cigarette lighters, and even ashes, taken down to the Mighty O and dropped into the grated smokestack.

That’s our first stop on our second dive: a mighty dark O on the Mighty O, a fine resting place for mementos and an excellent home for any fish smaller than a man. I let go of the grating, pump a little air into my buoyancy compensation vest, and ascend in search of Nolan, who’s headed for Pri-Fly, the primary flight control room. We glide into a narrow corridor and float up a flight of metal steps into the deluxe box seats, the VIP room of naval aviation. The angled window frames are empty of glass now, and the control panels, with their myriad screens and dials, are furred over with growth. Precision is giving way to the chaos of life, which is really just another, more mysterious, form of precision. Evolving though it is, Pri-Fly is still the best onboard view of the wild blue yonder. For the hovering barracuda, think roaring jets. For the orchestrated patterns of baitfish, think planes in formation and brave pilots awaiting their turn at the derring-do of a carrier landing.

But the silence, as they say, is deafening. Plato is widely thought to have said, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” The same might be said for wrecks.

We’re back aboard and toweling off when the videographers finally surface, handing up their scooters and waterproof cameras to the crew. Captain Douglas wastes no time firing up the engine and heading home. The weather is still perfect, the water smooth, and after congratulating each other on the fantastic diving we’ve just enjoyed, we recreational divers gravitate toward the back of the boat to get the scoop from the real pros.

They’ve been to the hangar, down to the props—home, I’ve heard, to at least one Goliath grouper—down to the sand bottom itself at 212 feet. Although Dan Crowell, proprietor of Seeker Digital Productions, calls the dive and the depth “practically routine for me,” the wreck, he says, is anything but. Renowned for his explorations of the Andrea Doria off the northeast coast and highly respected for his camera work on deep wrecks all over the world, Crowell knows a lot about the evolution of wrecks. The real beneficiaries of the artificial reef, he predicts, will be the children of this generation of divers.

“There’s so much structure in the water column that it’s going to attract really diverse marine life,” Crowell says. “In ten years go back and check it out. It’s going to be another Truk Lagoon.” But unlike that famous Micronesian dive “mecca,” right now the Mighty O belongs to us.

For a final treat, Crowell plays back some of the footage he shot from the sand looking up at the Mighty O’s prow. It’s a beautiful shot, the great anvil-shaped brute silhouetted in blue, making zero knots—and yet going everywhere, into the imaginations of thousands. Giberson said it best: “She’s a good ship. It’s gratifying to know she’ll still be serving long after I’m gone.”