Diving the Delray Beach Wreck

Sunday was a fabulous day for diving. Not much current, great water temperature and visibility for miles … well, feet but alot of feet – 40 to 50 feet easy. If you haven’t dived the Delray Beach Wreck, it can be a treat. It varies as sometimes the sand creeps up and covers parts of it but Sunday, it was great.

Coming up to the Boiler on the Delray Wreck

The usual way to get to the wreck is to take a 130 degree heading from the beach near Anchor Park when standing parallel to the street lamp on A1A and Casuarina. In this Google Maps image, I think you can see the boiler (round dark object off the beach – don’t ask me what the square one is – I’ve never tried to find out).

Delray Beach Entrance Point to the Wreck

Getting into the water was extra challenging this time (more later this week on that) so we just set off without a clear heading. Luckily Dave is a wonderful navigator and I just followed him straight on to the wreck.

Dave Finds a Wreck for Me

He was a little worried about the current – okay there was a little current – pushing us off to the north so he overcompensated a bit and we started out at the boiler instead of the wreck. The boiler is a great place to see lots of life because it’s covered with it. We saw so much life that I’ve decided to make the trip the feature for this week so I won’t go into all we saw here but as you can see from the picture of the boiler, I’m not just talking blennys here.

Yes, ladies and gentlement – that’s a little ray next to the boiler in that first picture. We swam around there for about half an hour or so watching fish, crustaceans and other sea creatures and then moved off to see if we could find the wreck itself. The wreck is about 60 or so feet north northwest of the boiler. We reached it without incident. Here’s the view coming up on the wreck from the boiler.

Delray Beach Wreck seen from the South East

As you can see, the wreck was about half covered in sand. I’ve been here when it was almost fully exposed and also when it was just not there at all. You take your chances with this wreck but there was still enough to see in and around the wreck. We spend about 15 minutes or so on the wreck – it is small after all and then decided to head back. Were we out of bottom time you ask? Were we out of air? Nope – we were out of time on the meter for the car. Next time, we’ll bring more quarters.

This was our first dive of the season and we enjoyed it very much. Let’s hope the rest of the summer goes just as well.