SS Andrea Doria

The shot goes in roughly 100 nautical miles off Montauk, after a run of ten hours or more, and from the first breath this is a trimix dive with staged decompression built into the plan before the boat ever leaves the dock. The Doria lies on her starboard side, her topmost structure now at 58 metres and the sand at 73. She went down in 27 fathoms, about 49 metres to her highest deck; seventy years of collapse have settled her lower and changed her shape every season since.

Conditions are why this wreck has a reputation that outruns its depth. A current of two to three knots is routine, heavy Atlantic sediment can drop visibility to nothing in seconds, and divers who have worked the wreck describe it as frigid even in its warmest months. Old fishing net still drapes sections of the hull, and near-invisible monofilament line running through the wreckage is a recognised entanglement hazard on top of the gas and deco planning.

She was a 213-metre Italian Line flagship, launched in 1951 and lost on the night of 25 July 1956, when the Swedish liner Stockholm struck her starboard side in fog and tore open her hull below the waterline. Forty-six of her passengers and five of Stockholm's crew died; Doria capsized and sank the following morning after staying afloat for roughly eleven hours. Divers reached the wreck within a week of the sinking.

At least 22 scuba divers have died working this wreck since then, to drowning, entanglement and decompression illness among other causes; in 1993, diver Robert Santuli died of oxygen poisoning here. The 'Mount Everest of scuba diving' nickname is younger than the death toll suggests, coined on live television after a CBS-covered 1983 expedition. Decay has not slowed: a 2016 submersible survey found her bow broken off the rest of the hull entirely.