Monday, October 26, 2026
By Brian Tress | Outer Banks Voice on July 29, 2024
“Right now, the ocean’s not looking too hateful,” says Dave Sommers, captain of the dive boat Lion’s Paw, as he surveys the horizon. Ann, his wife and dive-buddy since the mid-1980s, shrugs and adds, “It’s kind of right on the edge, isn’t it?” Dave and Ann own and run Dive Hatteras, the only charter diving operation on Hatteras Island.
It’s a borderline day for open-water diving given the combination of an approaching storm, swells that are 3 to 4 feet high and about 4 seconds apart, and wind blowing at 6 to 8 knots. Dave says, “The period – the frequency of the waves – is more important than the height. Four seconds apart is choppy.” He looks at Marc Corbett, longtime mate and now co-captain of the Lion’s Paw, who says, “You know me, I’ll dive in a hurricane.” Marc also leads the NC Shipwreck Project, whose mission is to identify and document shipwrecks along the North Carolina Coast. “We haven’t even gone airborne yet,” he adds.
With that, Dave goes down from the bridge to survey the rest of the passengers and crew – couple Elaine and Bill Turley, recreational divers from New York City and long-time Dive Hatteras customers; Jay King, dive instructor, leader of various Dive Hatteras charter groups, and member of the NC Shipwreck Project; and Panda Daniels, all-purpose protégé on the Lion’s Paw and also a member of the Shipwreck Project.
Marc continues, “This boat would stay afloat after we were all beaten to death by the waves – today they are just going thump, thump, thump, not THUUUUMP SLAM!”
The Lion’s Paw is a comfortable 42-foot Duffy boat built in Brooklin, Maine. Duffy boats are typically commercial offshore lobster/fishing boats known for their traditional lines, sea keeping abilities and well-crafted hulls.
Captain Dave comes back up and announces the results of the survey. “We decided to sneak it in before the bad weather,” he says. Just then, the boat does go airborne over a swell and shudders, or as Marc puts it, “shakes like a dog that just walked into your house after a rainstorm.”
Deciding whether to dive on a borderline day is not a casual undertaking. Weather and ocean conditions are monitored by the crew several nights before an excursion and during the day of the trip, which can be aborted at a word from Dave. Confidence is inspired by state-of-the-art technology and decades of experience.
“Dave understands the balance between having the best possible dive and keeping you safe. I completely trust him, that he is giving us the best information and choosing the best dive sites given the conditions,” says Elaine Turley. Elaine started diving in 2006 and has done it all over the world – from the Galapagos to Thailand to Truck Lagoon in Micronesia, known for its spectacular wreck diving. “Hatteras is my favorite place to dive,” she says. “It’s the beauty of these wrecks with all the natural life teeming around them. The magnificence of the marine life is unlike anywhere. The history – it’s always present for me when I’m down there. The warm and clear water – 80 degrees and 70 to 80 feet of visibility.” She adds, “I have been coming here for years and still have new experiences.”
At the first dive site – the F.W. Abrams, a tanker that was a victim of “friendly fire” in 1942 when she struck several mines in the Hatteras Minefield – Captain Dave shifted to a lower speed and Marc put on his gear and waited at the stern. About 10 miles south of Hatteras Inlet, the F. W. Abrams is the closest large wreck to the inlet and often reachable even if the weather is rough. As Dave viewed the wreck on his computer monitor – an irregular solid red splotch – the Lion’s Paw danced with the ocean swells until it was just in the right place. Then Dave yelled, “Dive, Dive, Dive!” and Marc was in the water.
Over the next few minutes, Dave steadied the boat while Marc attached the anchor line to the wreck 80 feet below the surface and connected it to a system of lines and weights used for descending and ascending. Marc climbed back onboard and then each of the divers jumped in procession off the stern, grabbing the weighted descent line to begin the journey down. The water was clear, blue, warm and welcoming after the rough surface journey.
About halfway down, the temperature suddenly dropped from 85 degrees to the mid-70s, marking the start of a thermocline, the transition layer between the warmer water at the surface and the cooler deep water below; it was bracing but not uncomfortable.
Marc had attached the anchor line to a part of the tanker’s likely storage tank, which was a short swim to three giant circular shapes rising in the near distance. These were the boilers, dotted with rivets, barnacles, and colorful soft coral swaying with the current. Small fish darted in and out of the holes in the rusted machinery, a stingray hovered over the sandy bottom and sped away, and a large flounder left a cloud of sand as it abandoned its hiding place on the bottom. Beyond the boilers, a steam piston pointed toward the surface like a spire atop a ruined temple, silhouetted by undulating sunlight.
The second dive site was only about two miles away. Like the F.W. Abrams, the salvage tug Keshena sank after colliding with an American mine in 1942 as it assisted two ships that had been damaged by German torpedoes. But unlike the F.W. Abrams, the entire wreck remains contiguous bow to stern, sitting on her keel and largely upright.
A resolute “Dive, Dive, Dive!” thundered from the bridge and Marc was back in the water attaching the various lines; then the second dive began. Once again, a thermocline created a significant downward shift in the water temperature during the descent. The hull of the wreck loomed on the bottom like a shadowy ghost ship, covered in sea anemones, purple, red, and yellow against a backdrop of rusted metal. There was high visibility and much marine life – a massive school of glittering baitfish danced between the divers and the surface like a single shape-shifting organism, a golden mouthed eel nestled in a hole that had rusted through the hull’s plating, and a frowning oyster toadfish peered warily out of a crevice in the hull, blending in with its surroundings. Yellow-tailed amberjack circled the divers as they ascended along the anchor line; at times, as they held on in the strong current, the divers found themselves perpendicular to the line, like a windsock blowing in a gale.
With both dives now complete, Marc took the helm and brought the Lion’s Paw all the way into Hatteras. A sense of calmness, accomplishment and contented exhaustion was pervasive among the divers.
On the drive back up to Kill Devil Hills, after the dives to the F.W. Abrams and the Keshena, the usually talkative Panda Daniels was quiet. After a while in contented silence, she begins, “Sometime last July, we set out to dive Diamond Shoals Lightship 71.” According to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, the unarmed vessel was attacked by a U-boat and sank in the waters off Hatteras in August 1918, the only U.S. light vessel sunk by enemy action during the twentieth century. It is still owned by the Coast Guard and on the National Registry of Historic Places.
“I was safety diver,” she says. “There was no current at all and we could see the 200-foot-deep shipwreck from the surface – it was incredible. On another day we might be hanging on to the line for dear life. We might even get out there and have to turn around. If you make it into the water at the dive site, it’s a successful day.”
Captain Dave Sommers has been a scuba diver for over five decades, first as a search and recovery diver for law enforcement in Northern Virginia, then a dive instructor, and finally a recreational diver in the waters off Hatteras Island beginning in the late 1980s. It was here where he became hooked by the sheer number of shipwrecks and their history, spanning from pre-civil war to World War II and beyond, the variety of sea life – “from tropical guppies to great whites” – and the warm and often crystal-clear waters of the Gulf Stream. He and his wife Ann – who owns half of Dive Hatteras and the Lion’s Paw – built a house in Frisco in 2003 and started running charters full-time after Dave retired from law enforcement in 2007.
According to Dave, “The heyday for wreck diving here was the 80s and 90s, then it kind of phased out. At one point there were six to eight dive boats in Hatteras. Now I’m the only one.” He explains, “You need to be an advanced diver here. It’s the combination of wind, swells, currents, and weather – the conditions can be off the charts. You also need to be persistent – 80% of our customers are repeats, some come every year, and they all know you could end up getting only two good days out of seven, or you might be lucky and end up with five. If your boat is not carrying 15 divers on a regular basis, it’s more lucrative to be a fishing charter.”
Lucky for Dave and the divers who love it here, he and his wife Ann don’t do this only for the money. As Dave puts it, “What’s the point of running a dive boat if you don’t get to dive yourself?” He continues, “I love being on the boat. There’s absolutely nothing like being on the ocean on a beautiful day, dolphin following us, water super purple-blue, turtles breaching the surface, ocean birds all over, and the sheer excitement of the dive and exploration.” Individual divers pay a standard rate of $200 for an excursion on the Lion’s Paw.
Panda Daniels, enthusiastic protégé to the senior members of the crew, explains, “There’s a magnetism to diving the shipwrecks here – there’s up here and then there’s down there. It’s transcendence to another time down there. Sometimes there are skeletons. Sharks. The world shrinks down and the only thing that matters is that next breath – it creates a pause that’s intensely peaceful.”
Besides the wrecks, the marine life is a major draw for recreational divers. Marc Corbett says, “The biodiversity is intense here. You can see anything in the ocean off the Diamond Shoals. We see sharks about 65% of the time.” A series of shifting, underwater sandbars located off the coast of Cape Hatteras, the Diamond Shoals are where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream collide with the cold waters of the Labrador current resulting in a unique intersection of marine life, not to mention the volatile ocean conditions that have contributed to so many wrecks.
Marc adds, “I’ve seen 100 sharks at once, hanging out on a shipwreck. And a great white. Sometimes the sand tiger sharks just slide up right under you and rub you.”
The next installment will look at The NC Shipwreck Project and research projects affiliated with the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island.
Comments
Renegade Snorkler
Thank you Brian Tress for a beautifully written story and providing me an optimistic glimpse of our off-shore wildlife.
I look forward to Part II.
Uncle Bob
Very well written. I found it fun to read,educational and enjoyable.
Can’t wait for the next article.