St. Eustatius - Chien Tong wreck

Setting

The Chien Tong, St. Eustatius, dived 25 February 2026 as the first dive of the day. The wreck is a steel cargo vessel sitting upright and essentially intact on sand, and the frames read as a tour of a ship rather than of a reef: pipe railings running the full length of the bulwarks, a flat expanse of deck plating with rectangular cargo hatches still square-edged, a horizontal winch drum on its bed, an upright derrick or mast frame with a diver silhouetted through it, and a clean sweep of bow rail shot from below against the surface light (e.g., Image 3, Image 12, Image 13, Image 21, Image 25, Image 26, Image 32, Image 33, Image 39, Image 42, Image 43).

312132125263233394243

Depth and structure are legible throughout — the hull sides drop straight into dark blue and one frame looks along the sheer line with two divers finning off the plating (e.g., Image 8, Image 9, Image 45).

8945

General benthic features

Colonization is strongly patterned by orientation. The horizontal deck plates are only thinly filmed, still gray and bare-looking, while the vertical hull sides, bulwark edges, railings, and ironwork carry a dense encrusting community: lime-green branching rope sponge, yellow tube sponges (Aplysina-type), a scarlet strawberry-textured sponge, maroon and vermilion encrusting sheets, purple and blue films, filamentous turf, and pink coralline algae (e.g., Image 2, Image 5, Image 17, Image 38, Image 46, Image 49).

2517384649

Cream-yellow button-like cup corals (Tubastraea-type, likely the introduced orange cup coral so common on Caribbean wrecks — not confirmable from the frame) crust the winch and its bed (e.g., Image 30).

30

Stony-coral recruitment onto the hull is the interesting part. One frame catches a clean pairing on bare plating: a yellow-green maze coral (Meandrina meandrites-type) roughly the size of a coaster beside a tan colony with large, deeply cupped, well-separated corallites consistent with Montastraea cavernosa (e.g., Image 48).

48

Elsewhere a small fleshy-polyped mussid (Isophyllia/Mussa-type) sits in a turf-and-coralline mosaic, and a low domed brain-type colony perches on a bulwark rail (e.g., Image 4).

4

All are small, young colonies — the wreck is being colonized rather than overgrown (e.g., Image 15, Image 22, Image 37, Image 40, Image 50).

1522374050

A small red anemone or corallimorph with white tentacles occupies a hole in the encrusted plating (e.g., Image 47).

47

Coral cover

Coral cover: 3.8% — a blind Claude computer-vision point count of 62 of Anderson's unedited photographs (20 points per photo; water, fish, and obstructions excluded). Other computer-vision methods are listed in the method table. Wreck and artificial-structure site: this cover value counts coral growing on man-made structure (steel, concrete, wreck debris) and the bottom around it, so it isn't comparable with natural-reef cover or with regional averages.

Fish and other fauna

Fauna: a great barracuda hangs behind the winch, a bar jack cruises the open water off the hull, sergeant majors and small baitfish work the superstructure, and a lone schooling fish shelters in the winch housing (e.g., Image 6, Image 18, Image 35).

61835

Comparisons with other data

No independent survey was made at this exact site; the nearest ones are listed in the table below.