Several readers of Jack Fullmer’s article, “A Shark in the Guise of an Angelfish,” have asked the author to elaborate on some of his comments. This addendum to his paper explains how the UNESCO Convention completely fails to comprehend the real threat to shipwrecks, and briefly relates the destruction of shipwreck resources off the New Jersey coast from massive beach replenishment and sand mining projects. The story of this sand replenishment project has been typical of government supported destruction of our shipwreck resources and clearly shows how selective enforcement by these officials, supported by unenlightened marine archaeologists has condemned private salvors and use them as a scapegoat for the loss of our cultural heritage.

In 1994, the New Jersey Council of Diving Clubs (NJCDC) and the New Jersey Historical Divers Association (NJHDA) became aware of a government backed plan to replenish beaches from Sandy Hook to Barnegat Inlet (actually Sea Bright to Seaside Park), a 32 mile section of Beach. The first two sections of the project (Sea Bright to Manasquan Inlet) were scheduled to start in two short years, and would cover the underwater habitat of at least 80 long jetties. The project design indicated the sand would impact out to 400 yards from the beach

To our horror, we realized that ten known shipwrecks in the replenishment area of Section One and Two would be buried by this massive project. These wrecks included the Manasquan Wreck, the Antioch, the Western World, the Malta, the Rijukan, the Pliny, the Rusland, the Adonis, the Elberon Wreck, and the Chauncy Jerome, Jr. Most are well known fishing and sport diving wrecks and have been for the last 30-40 years. The Chauncy Jerome, Jr. is presently on the National Register of Historic Sites, and the Manasquan Wreck is believed to be one of the original three Black Ball Line packet ships that wrecked in 1824, and very historically significant. Almost all the wrecks, with the exception of the Antioch, are 19th Century shipwrecks. If the 12 mile third section (Manasquan Inlet to Seaside Park) is ever built, at least another five shipwrecks will be impacted.

A delegation from the NJCDC and the NJHDA met with the NY Branch of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then separately with the NJDEP, to explore ways of avoiding the destruction of the shipwrecks, to no avail. Apparently the replenished sand will spread out and migrate north, so that a specific area cannot be avoided and the whole beach will be impacted. The meetings also revealed that the COE had only found about half the known beach wrecks.

Apparently the remote sensing survey conducted by the Army Corps of Engineers was not a complete survey (did not mag or side scan large sections of beach between Shark River and Sea Bright), and its probable that wrecks were missed that neither the sport diving community or the COE knew anything about. A project was rushed through to look at known wrecks that were missed, and the NJCDC and NJHDA cooperated with the contract archaeologists to locate, identify and survey these wrecks, and that worked out very well.

After a project engineer made a sarcastic remark to me that the shipwrecks to be buried were of little importance, I decided to move ahead with a planned National Register nomination of a shipwreck in the replenishment area off North Long Branch, New Jersey. This was a Conn. built great packet ship that wrecked in January, 1854 called the Chauncy Jerome, Jr., and I was involved in its discovery in 1970. After a lot of work, and with the help of Dan Lieb’s mapping skills, the wreck was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996. But this did not protect the shipwreck from being buried.

In fact, one archaeologist (not from the NJHPO or COE offices), who did not dive and never saw a shipwreck in her life, actually supported burying the shipwrecks. She made a statement to me that the project should benefit the wrecks because the sand would protect the wrecks from storms and anyone who might be interested in artifacts. Ironically this narrow-minded and distorted protectionist mentality in the academic and archaeological community is partly responsible for the wholesale destruction of shipwrecks in New Jersey.

A shipwreck, whether its located near the beach or further offshore, is a focal point for marine life. The hard habitat of the shipwreck allows smaller marine life, such as mussels, to anchor to it, thus providing food for larger fish. The wreck also provides shelter and hiding places for the fish. When seen with good underwater visibility, a shipwreck is like a big aquarium. Literally thousands of fish can be seen. Fish and marine life that require hard habitat include Tautog, Sea Bass, Begalls, Lobster, and so on. Striped Bass are also seen on the beach wrecks. Because of the cold water, the larger fish migrate to deeper water in the winter months, but return to the beach wrecks in the spring.

From Asbury Park south, these inshore wrecks and the U/W habitat of jetties may constitute the only hard U/W habitat found for miles around. In fact, National Marine Fisheries Service now considers shipwreck habitat as potential essential fisheries habitat. The massive sand replenishment project kills the fish on the wrecks, buries the hard habitat the marine life needs to survive, and destroys the food source on the wrecks. Burying these wrecks also prevent the other users of the resource, like fishermen, from benefiting from the resource. It also prevents archaeologists and sport divers from mapping and learning more about the wrecks! A wreck that is buried is truly destroyed of its usefulness to society. In my opinion, anyone that thinks a sand replenishment project is protecting shipwrecks has the brains of a lizard.

A less understood problem with beach replenishment projects is the borrow areas! The borrow areas are large swaths of ocean floor, usually offshore of the replenishment areas, that the huge hopper dredges use as sources of sand. When you add up all the borrow areas for the Sea Bright to Manasquan Inlet section of this project, you have at least four square miles of ocean bottom. This much ocean bottom between the old and busy ports of New York and Philadelphia guarantees that shipwrecks will be impacted.

The NJCDC did not at first realize the threat to shipwreck resources that the borrow areas represented until it became aware of the huge size of these borrow areas. Our first thought was to poll the dive boat captains to find out if any known shipwrecks were located in the borrow areas, since by that time we were questioning the ability of the COE to find shipwrecks, at least inshore. This met with mixed success, as some dive boat and fishing captains would rather part with their right arm then share shipwreck locations. Another problem was actually describing the location of the borrow areas to the Dive Boat Captains. The COE supplied us the location of the borrow areas only in State Plane Coordinates (SPC), which is an engineering tool that is completely unfamiliar to Dive Boat captains that find wrecks with the aid of Loran C or GPS. The NJCDC had to find someone to convert the SPC to geographic coordinates.

One captain told us of a wreck just outside of Belmar Borrow Area Six called the Belmar Wreck. This spread-out wreck turned out to be the remains of an old side-wheeler. The COE remote sensing survey had already detected the wreck and steps were promised to protect it. The COE uses a policy of avoidance of shipwrecks in borrow areas. If a wreck occurs in a borrow area, they draw a little square around it and tell the dredge contractor to avoid the square. But the edge of that square is only 100 foot from the wreck, and the wreck is not otherwise investigated.

In the summer of 1997, the dredge started taking sand from Belmar Borrow Area Six in federal waters over three miles from shore. While diving the Belmar wreck that summer, I had an opportunity to observe the 500-foot long dredge up close. These dredges are huge, the size of an ocean liner, and move along while sucking vast quantities of sand.

In August, a rumor started to circulate in the dive community that a dredge had hit a shipwreck. I tracked this rumor down to a popular dive boat captain who told me that he had gone out to confirm GPS numbers from his old loran numbers on a wreck called the Green Hull Wreck. When he arrived at the old loran numbers, the bottom showed the unmistakable signature of having been plowed over by a sand mining dredge. After securing the Loran numbers for the wreck, I went out on Dan’s dive boat in early September and asked him to drop me on the Loran numbers of the Green Hull Wreck near Belmar Borrow Area Six. Little did I realize that this dive would be one of the most bizarre and memorable experiences of my life.

The underwater visibility was extremely good that day, maybe 40 feet or more. As I approached the bottom of the buoy line, a strange and surrealistic world revealed itself. Huge parallel furrows about 5 feet high extended unending into the murk, like a farmers field plowed by a giant. At the very bottom between the dredge furrows was a cloudy layer that looked like fog. Broken clamshells were evident, but the area was a complete dead zone with no sign of life.

After searching a pattern up and down every other furrow for about 15 minutes, I saw something in the distance. Sitting atop one of the furrows was a piece of wooden wreckage about 10 foot by 12 foot. Closer examination revealed it had copper sheathing and treenails sticking out. A large scrape mark could be seen over the top. Large bronze pins also protruded from a rib (futtocks) nearby. The only living thing to be seen were a few sea bass under the wreckage. A search of 2 -3 hundred feet in all directions revealed no other wreckage, but the uniform and unending furrows continued on in all four directions.

After I returned to the boat, Dan and another diver dove the remains of the Green Hull wreck. Dan did a detailed drawing of the wreckage. A few days later I notified both the New York Branch of the COE and NJSHPO of the apparent destruction of a shipwreck by a sand mining dredge. I also wrote a letter to the COE and SHPO questioning some of their assumptions about protecting shipwrecks in and near borrow areas.

Shortly thereafter someone brought to my attention an article that appeared in the Asbury Park Press on Aug 24, 1997 on page C5 that recounted a reporter’s visit to the 510 foot long Dredge Long Island operating in Belmar Borrow Area Six a little more then 3 miles offshore: “Off to one side of the main walkway is a collection of waterlogged timbers with protruding copper nails and pipes. The timbers come from the same site, possibly an old wreck, and have been sucked up by the dredge’s powerful vacuum arms for the past few days.”

The wording in the article suggested that the dredge repeatedly hit the wreck site over a period of days. According to the COE, the dredge captain is required to immediately report any wreckage to the COE, but that never happened!

A few months later I got around to plotting out the Loran C numbers of the Green Hull wreck and was surprised to find that it appeared to be outside the Borrow Area. This was later confirmed by the COE. The Dredge is violating its contract by operating outside the Borrow Area, as that area has not been checked for shipwrecks and may not have desirable sand.

In February of 1998, I went to NY City and met with representatives of the NYCOE to discuss the problems encountered in Belmar Borrow Area Six. I was promised a written explanation of their findings with steps to be taken, but that never happened!

On January 10th, 2000 a proposal for sand mining off the New Jersey coast (Long Branch to south of Belmar beyond three miles) appeared in the Federal Register with requests for comments under federal Mineral Management Service (MMS). Since this happened to include the same area as Belmar Borrow Area Six, it afforded a perfect opportunity to publicly air the problems of borrow areas and sand dredges that we were now only too familiar with. However, I would like to reiterate that MMS had nothing to do with what happened in Belmar Borrow Area Six, but it is technically the responsible agency for Sand Mining in Federal waters even though it had never issued a permit to the COE to sand mine in Belmar Borrow Area Six.

My letter (testimony) stated that the NJ Council of Diving Clubs believes there is a serious problem concerning procedures to safeguard shipwrecks in and near sand mining borrow areas, and covered a number of key points involving wrong assumptions about borrow areas. The first wrong assumption is that sand harvesters are accurate in their positioning. A sand harvester the size of an ocean liner full of sand weighing many, many thousands of tons and moving along while scooping up sand cannot be expected to be precise. Yet the project designers only allowed a hundred foot buffer zone between the dredge and a target or shipwreck in the borrow area, about 1/5 the length of the dredge.

Even if the sand harvester is able to avoid the wreck, ask yourself what will happen if you lower the level of sand (8-20 feet) completely around and close to a shipwreck? Storms will soon even this out exposing the wooden wreck to marine worms and possibly collapsing it. A much, much larger buffer zone is needed.

Project designers will place a square (buffer zone) around a target within the borrow area and assume the dredge will avoid it. What they forget is that a dredge that size needs a long straight run and will take that long straight run regardless of targets and buffer zones.

The NYCOE also fails to design a perimeter buffer zone in its projects. The purpose of a perimeter buffer zone is to insure that the area immediately adjacent to the borrow area is side scanned and magged to determine if any wrecks are nearby. One side of Belmar Borrow area Six had no side scan results one yard beyond the side of the borrow area. When I asked one of the contract archaeologist responsible for the remote sensing of another borrow area, he stated that he was only a sub contractor and can only do what he is contracted to do. If the contract doesn’t call for side scanning the area immediately adjacent to the borrow area, then he does not side scan it! It is the people that design the project that decide if there is a perimeter buffer zone and the size of that buffer zone, not the archaeologists that do the remote sensing.

Furthermore, the dredge was proven to be significantly outside the borrow area. The wreck was outside the borrow area to start with, and then the furrows continued on at least another 300 feet beyond the wreck (as far as I went) without any indication of stopping. The dredge was a long, long way outside the borrow area.

Another wrong assumption is that the Army Corps of Engineers is checking to insure sand mining dredges are staying in assigned borrow areas and avoiding buffer zones around targets or shipwrecks. I asked that question and found out that neither the COE or anyone else is checking to insure that the dredges are avoiding buffer zones or staying in the borrow areas.

That’s like a supervisor not checking on the work of a subordinate! Yet it’s very easy to check.

Any small boat with a good recording depth sounder and GPS can make the check during the sand mining operation. For several months after sand mining, where a sand mining dredge has been operating is unmistakable by just looking at the wildly erratic scoured bottom with a simple recording depth sounder.

Another wrong assumption is that the COE is checking targets or shipwrecks found in the borrow areas. No diver investigation is done at all. The COE has no idea if the wreck is of historic importance or not. The assumption of avoidance and no investigation is used to reduce cost, but this incident proves that avoidance cannot be assumed. Furthermore, it would later be proved that what one interpreter took to be a scour mark was really low-lying wreckage. Remote sensing does not tell you exactly what is on the bottom. For that you need a diver!

Another wrong assumption is that the dredge captain will follow instructions. The COE requires a dredge to immediately report back if it hits a shipwreck or wreckage starts coming out of the dredge. That did not happen and is unlikely to happen. In fact, there is evidence the dredge kept hitting the wreck over a period of days and never reported back! It’s also questionable if the dredge could have been that far out of the borrow area accidentally.

Another false assumption is that responsible agencies will penalize a sand harvester that fails to follow its instructions. Those provisions may actually exist, but to my knowledge no penalty was ever imposed on the Dredge for hitting a shipwreck outside the borrow area, or for failing to report observable wreckage to the COE.

My letter to MMS on the Belmar Borrow Area Six incident apparently had some impact. The COE had an underwater archaeologist conduct an investigation of the incident, although three years after the incident had originally been reported to them. The resulting report was called the “Underwater Inspection of Two Wrecks, Belmar Borrow Area 6, Atlantic Coast of New Jersey Beach Erosion Control Project, Reach Asbury South Belmar to Manasquan.”

The archaeologist verified the location of the Green Hull Wreck outside of Belmar Borrow Area Six, and that it had been hit by the dredge. He verified that actually 2 different shipwrecks were hit, one inside (unknown to me at the time) and one outside the borrow area. He verified that the dredge’s log had indicated hitting wood that was never reported to the COE, verified that the buffer zone within the borrow area that was supposed to protect the known wreck (2nd wreck) had been breached by the dredge damaging this wreck. He verified that the Green Hull Wreck had been mistaken for a bottom scour, and verified that the Dredge’s log indicated the dredge was outside the borrow area.

A 750-foot buffer zone was recommended for the Green Hull Wreck and the Belmar Wreck. It was recommended that the dredge’s captain have full knowledge of the avoidance area, along with passing on any cost to the responsible parties for damage to a shipwreck site.

The archaeologist had the courage to find his own contractor (COE) partly at fault, and for that he should be commended.

No mention was made of obvious design errors in the project, or of implementing changes (750 foot buffer zones) for other borrow areas with shipwrecks present, or checking that dredges stay within borrow areas. No mention was made of a general lack of standards for the avoidance of shipwrecks, or of replacing destroyed shipwreck habitat.

To my knowledge, the NYCOE continues to use an inadequate 100 foot buffer zone around shipwrecks or targets within borrow areas, continues to ignore the need for a perimeter buffer zone, fails to check to determine if dredges are staying in the borrow area or avoiding buffer zones within borrow areas, fails to do any diver investigation of targets in borrow areas, and fails to implement penalties to those dredge captains that ignore instructions. As long as this situation is permitted, no shipwreck will ever be safe in or near any borrow area. And agencies like the Advisory Council of Historic Preservation that carelessly sign off on the “Memorandum of Agreement” on each and every project while allowing this situation to continue are not doing any favors for historic preservation.

What’s really galling is that just a few simple steps to properly survey borrow areas and properly supervise these dredges would probably safeguard shipwrecks from being pulverized in and near borrow areas. These simple steps would cost little or nothing compared to the total cost of the project. Let me reiterate that it is not the contract archaeologists that are to fault, as they can only do what their employer contracts them to do.

Is there hope? In the replenishment area, the Chauncy Jerome, Jr. is coming out of the sand. Unfortunately, that area is due for replenishment again (replenished every 6 years) and it will likely be buried again. The Elberon and Pliny Wrecks have not been buried yet as that section ran into permit problems.

Regarding the borrow areas, in May 2002 Mineral Management Service issued a request for vendors to examine the efficacy of the present buffer zones and their ability to protect these resources. New Jersey is doing a comprehensive Ocean Management Plan and the first topic is Sand Mining, and I was actually asked for input. Maybe the needed standards for shipwreck avoidance in borrow areas are on the horizon, but I wouldn’t count on it. On August 29th, 2001 a meeting was conducted on this very issue at the SHPO in Trenton with the COE and other agencies in attendance. I was not allowed to attend, and apparently nothing was done to improve avoidance of shipwrecks in and near borrow areas.

To return to my point in “A Shark in the Guise of an Angelfish,” the biggest destroyer of shipwrecks in the United States today is certainly not commercial salvors, but government agencies that routinely destroy our shipwreck resources by rubberstamping these massive, poorly designed projects. These projects destroy wrecks by both burying them in replenishment areas and pulverizing them in borrow areas. The projects destroy wrecks as an archaeological and cultural resource, as a reef or biological system, and as a fishing and diving resource.

The Belmar Borrow Area Six incident is just the tip of an iceberg. The only reason this incident was detected at all had to do with the intense amount of sport diving done in this area and an observant reporter, and probably only one wreck in 20 that is pulverized by a dredge or buried by a replenishment project is ever reported.

Since massive sand replenishment projects became popular in the 1990s, the destruction of our shipwreck resources has accelerated on an unprecedented scale up and down the East coast. Although commercial fishing is also a factor in shipwreck destruction (another story), the number one destroyer of shipwrecks in the United States today is these massive, government supported projects.

Jack Fullmer

Legislative Director,

New Jersey Council of Diving Clubs

E-Mail - JF2983182@aol.com