Hi Andrew---since youve been diving over there-----give us your inpressions of the reef----
Tom
We dove the reef face from the landing channel up to near the NW tip of the island from the surf line down to 60 to 80 Ft in depth looking for anything that might seem to be out of place. This included swimming up pretty much each and every valley or channel in the shallows next to the reef edge to see if there was anything lodged in those channels, so a lot of it was body surfing up the channels with the surge to a point where the waves were breaking, and then surfing out again.
The reef in 2001 was very healthy with a lot of fish, live coral, turtles and sharks. From a diver's point of view, it was spectacular, with visibility upwards of 100 ft on many days. The reef drops off steeply at about a 45 degree slope to a depth deeper than we were willing to go. The only man made stuff we found was directly downslope of the NC wreck, and there really wasn't as much of it as we expected - a few pipes, some steel plate, few other mis, and that was it. The back end of the ship was nowhere to be seen, and there really wasn't even a scar in the reef where it went down. The ROV in 2010 found little there as well, down to some 900 ft. Will be interesting to find the rest of the NC someday when we have deep water capability.
In 2007 the reef was nowhere near as healthy, and the number of fish were way down. I did not do any diving in 2007. There had been a general warming in the area in 2002 that apparently killed a lot of the coral, some sort of El Nino effect. By 2010, much of the reef seems to have recovered.
What else would you like to know?
Andrew