On the fringes of the Gulf Stream, off the east coast of Florida, the sea is very deep and very blue. I hold tight to the railing on the fly deck of the dive boat as it rolls sharply from side to side, and look down into water that’s a thicker, denser color than I’ve ever seen.
For a moment I imagine that if I leaned over the side and dipped my hand in the water, it would come out coated in blue, like paint. Golden fragments of seaweed float by, escapees, perhaps, from the Sargasso Sea’s swirling gyre in the Atlantic Ocean. I would be content to stay on deck, watching the sea’s colors go by, but there are deeper things for me to see. I pull on my dive gear and jump in. Beneath the waterline, as I kick downward, the colors lose their intensity and slowly fade away.
Sitting on the sandy seabed at 100 feet is a shipwreck. It’s a tanker that was seized in 1989 after U.S. customs found it stuffed with marijuana, and was then deliberately scuttled and sunk to create a new underwater habitat. I aim for the deck that’s become fuzzy with a halo of seaweeds, corals and other soft creatures, and hunker down behind the railing at the back of the ship in a quiet spot away from the current.
Dark shadows lurk nearby in a hatch in the tanker’s superstructure. Before I see the animals inside, I hear them, or rather I feel them push pressure pulses into the water that resonate through my body. The bass notes are probably around 50 or 60 hertz, the lower notes on a pipe organ. Another boom and I notice the wreck is vibrating. Then a fish reveals itself, a goliath grouper. It looks as if it were carved from a great chunk of granite; it may well weigh as much as a grizzly bear.
Since the wreck was installed on the seabed, the goliaths have adopted it as a seasonal home where they congregate in the summer months to mate. There are far fewer of these fish across the midwest Atlantic than there once were, though. Not so long ago, their meat was canned for dog food and their carcasses used to smuggle drugs into the U.S. For decades, they’ve been a favorite of sports fishermen who love to reel them in, hold them up for photos, then throw them back into the sea, already dead. A 2009 study measured the goliath grouper’s historic decline using archives of trophy photographs taken by sport fishermen. In the 1950s, the catch of goliaths often outweighed the human passengers on board a sport fishing boat; their numbers had already been decimated by the late ’70s.
