Shipwreck trail worth a dive

Sue Cocking - 

Move over, Miami Beach. You’re not the only scuba diving destination with a wreck trek. Fort Lauderdale also boasts an underwater path that guides divers to five sunken ships in a single plunge. There’s just no telling what you might encounter as you drift or kick from one to the next.

Dive master Grant Hogan and Bill Cole, operator of the Sea Experience dive shop and charter boat out of Bahia Mar Yachting Center, recently escorted our group of three on a 45-minute tour, 70 feet deep.

The tour stops: the Pride, a dismasted schooner; the Moon Shot, remnants of a derelict sailboat; the Jay Scutti, a 97-foot-long tugboat sunk by Broward County as an artificial reef in 1986; the Ken Vitale/Tracy, a 131-foot former drug ship deployed as a reef in 1999; and the Merci Jesus, another former drug boat sunk the year before the Tracy.

The sunken boats, about 200 feet apart, run in a north-south line about a mile off Lauderdale-by-the-Sea. Rebar stakes and cinderblocks serve as a trail connecting them.

This shipwreck trail isn’t as expansive as Wreck Treks I, II, and III constructed in the 1990s off Miami Beach by the late dive operator Rick Smith. But there’s plenty to occupy even the most impatient explorer.

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