The water off Bohicket Creek had a problem in it for four years.
A 120-foot torpedo retriever sat wedged in the South Carolina marsh, leaking oil into sensitive waterways and blocking the flow of tidal water.
Nobody had moved it.
Then one December morning a tug towed it about 32 miles out to sea, two crew members pulled two levers that opened a set of valves below deck, and the whole problem slipped beneath the Atlantic in about two hours.
What happened next was not on the schedule.
Why the hull became a home so quickly
Off South Carolina, most of the continental shelf is covered by sand several feet deep, and only about 10 percent of the bottom has the geological makeup that allows a reef community to form, according to the state’s natural resource managers. That means the sea floor for miles around the Y-73 reef site is close to a bare plain, offering little for a fish to hide in, feed from or spawn against.
Any hard structure dropped into that becomes one of the only vertical surfaces available. Steel hulls work especially well for the job.
Rust, crevices and seams give barnacles, sponges and other invertebrates a grip that shifting sand cannot, and as those animals take hold the structure begins feeding the fish that in turn feed larger fish. State managers expect the new reef to benefit species ranging from the snapper grouper complex to highly migratory fish.
That colonization takes seasons, not minutes. The animals that turned up on the first morning were something else entirely.
What the vessel was and where it had been sitting
The 120-foot torpedo retriever, designated TWR-8419 and later named HAZAR by an owner, was one of ten such vessels built for the Navy. It spent its working life supporting weapons research at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, a heavy duty steel hull built for hard Atlantic conditions.
After decommissioning, it was bought at auction in Rhode Island and sailed to Charleston, where it was anchored until a storm pushed it into the marsh. It stayed there for more than four years, blocking tidal water flow and threatening the surrounding habitat, while residents of Rockville and nearby Seabrook Island pressed for its removal.
A Charleston-area towing company freed it in August, and the hull went to a shipyard on Younges Island. Before it could be sunk, crews stripped out all fuel, hydraulic fluids, motors and other materials that could threaten the marine environment. Only after that cleaning was the hull cleared to go to the bottom.
The morning the crew pulled the levers
A convoy of boats carrying state natural resources staff, conservation association members and the towing crew circled the ship on a dreary Sunday morning in early December as it slowly took on water. Crews had boarded the tug the day before to haul the vessel out to the reef site and begin the sinking at first light.
Once in position, two crew members tossed a cinderblock anchor over the stern to help drag the hull into the depths. Then they pulled two levers that opened a set of valves below deck, inviting the Atlantic aboard.
Choppy water jostled the ship, and the deck opening once used to load and unload torpedoes took in the sea. It was roughly two hours, plus a few deliberate nudges from the tug, before the stern went under.
Moments after the hull slipped beneath the surface, spotted dolphins appeared and circled the site. No one aboard called them in, and no one has established what drew them. Dolphins hunt by echolocation and are known to investigate unfamiliar objects, but whether the sinking itself pulled them in is not something a single morning on the water can settle.
The state’s 612th reef and what lives there now
The deployment marked the state’s 612th artificial reef, and the 25th completed through its partnership with a state conservation association. That number is not an accident. The state has been adding hard bottom structure to its coastal waters systematically for decades, using retired barges, surplus vessels and other heavy hardware, because the sandy shelf leaves fish concentrated on a small fraction of the available sea floor.
“You’re taking something that had a previous life and repurposing it for at least another 25 years,” the state’s artificial reef program director said. “These artificial reefs act exactly like natural reefs.” Sunk in about 100 feet of water, the ship will now spread fishing pressure across an area dominated by sand while providing the hard bottom that was missing there.
What the program gives back and what it still cannot fix
Artificial reefs do not fully replace natural ones. Habitat built from steel corrodes over decades, and the species mix it supports can differ from what a rocky natural bottom holds.
Some researchers find that artificial structures mainly concentrate fish already present rather than growing net populations, a debate ecologists have not closed. Even so, the vessel’s second purpose is a clear gain measured against a rotting hull in a tidal creek.
Bohicket Creek, meanwhile, is no longer obstructed by a derelict ship, and the tidal flow the marsh depends on runs through the space where the hull once sat. That recovery was the original goal, and the reef was the bonus that came with it.
The dolphins that circled within minutes did not wait for any of that reasoning about reefs. They simply arrived, in a stretch of ocean where something new and solid had just appeared on a plain of sand.
Read the whole thing?
Get the week's signal, not the noise
Our sharpest reporting on energy, climate and nature — free, once a week.
