What the Bermuda Triangle Looks Like Underwater: A Diver’s Report

A week diving inside the Bermuda Triangle

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

For most of my life, the Bermuda Triangle was a concept I knew of but had never really pondered. Ships disappear. Planes vanish. Compass needles spin. I do not remember where I heard all of this. It was just always there in the background, the way you know the names of dinosaurs you have never thought about.

Then I flew to Bermuda for a week to dive it.

I was there for the first annual Bermuda Dive Festival, staying at the Hamilton Princess. Over the week I dived the Hermes, the Caraquet, the Marie Celestia, North Rock, Hog Breaker, the King George, and Leamington Cave. The visibility ran the full range, from about 20 feet on the murky days to a clean 100 feet at the Caraquet, North Rock and Hog Breaker.

What I found underwater bore no resemblance to anything I had imagined. There were no anomalies. There was no fog. My compass behaved itself the entire week.

What there was, in every direction, was wreckage.

Bermuda sits on a ring of shallow reef in the middle of the North Atlantic, and that ring has been catching ships for four hundred years. Most of them are still down there. You can swim through them. After a week of doing exactly that, I came away with a much clearer picture of what this place actually is, and it is not what the pseudo-documentaries sell.

What is the Bermuda Triangle, actually?

The Bermuda Triangle, sometimes called the Devil’s Triangle, is a loosely defined region of the western North Atlantic Ocean. The three corners are usually drawn as Miami, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda. Inside that triangle, depending on which version of the story you encounter, somewhere between 50 and 1,000 ships and planes have disappeared since the 1500s.

A few things worth knowing about the boundary:

The Triangle is not an officially recognized geographic region. The United States Board on Geographic Names has never recognized it, and NOAA does not consider the area to have an unusual concentration of incidents.

It covers roughly 500,000 square miles, depending on how you draw it. That is about the size of California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho combined.

It sits on the natural sea lane between the United States East Coast and Europe, and between the Caribbean and most of North America. More ships and planes pass through it than through most equivalent stretches of ocean, which means proportionally more incidents.

The name was coined in 1964 by writer Vincent Gaddis in a magazine article called The Deadly Bermuda Triangle. Charles Berlitz published a bestselling book on it in 1974. Most of what the public believes about the Triangle traces back to those two sources.

Bermuda itself sits at the northeastern corner of the Triangle. It is the only landmass inside its boundary. Which means if you are diving in Bermuda, you are diving inside the Triangle. Every reef. Every wreck. Every parrotfish.

The first annual Bermuda Dive Festival

I came for the first annual Bermuda Dive Festival, and the festival turned out to be the real story of the trip.

Bermuda has not historically marketed itself as a dive destination. The tourism board has put very little focus on diving or underwater activities, despite the island sitting on one of the densest and most historically significant wreck fields on Earth. The festival is an attempt to change that, and this first year was mostly local divers, with the organizers openly working to build it into something that draws international attendance over time.

The highlight was a night dive off a beach with more than twenty divers in the water at once, followed by a bonfire with a DJ and drinks on the sand. There is a specific kind of good that comes from standing around a fire with a crowd of people who all just did the same dive, still half in their wetsuits, talking about what they saw. That is the part of dive travel that keeps people coming back, and the festival nailed it on the first try.

If the event grows the way the organizers hope, with more international divers and ideally a single host resort running dive operations on site, it could genuinely put Bermuda on the map as a wreck diving destination. The raw material is already there. The wrecks are world class. What has been missing is the infrastructure and the will to point visitors at the water. This festival is the first real push in that direction, and I would come back for the second one.

The shipwrecks and reefs I dived in Bermuda

Bermuda is known among divers as one of the shipwreck capitals of the Atlantic. There are over 300 documented wrecks within recreational diving depth around the island, and the actual number is almost certainly higher. They span four centuries, from Spanish galleons to nineteenth century blockade runners to a World War One era freighter.

Here are the ones I dived.

The Hermes

The Hermes is the postcard wreck of Bermuda, and it earns it. A 165-foot freighter deliberately sunk in 1985 as an artificial reef, she sits upright and almost fully intact in about 80 feet of water off the south shore. You can swim the length of the deck, drop through the cargo holds, and pass through the wheelhouse. Because she was cleaned and placed intentionally, the structure is sound enough to penetrate safely, and the rectangular openings throw the kind of light that makes wreck photography worth doing. 

Visibility when I was here was not great, maybe 50 ft and cloudy. On a better day it is a perfect wreck for photography. It is not unusual for visibility to 100 ft or more here, but recent storms on the island impacted the vis.

The Marie Celestia

The Mary Celestia is the history lesson. A side paddle wheel steamer that sank in 1864 while running supplies for the Confederacy during the American Civil War, she has been on the seafloor longer than most countries have had their current borders. Worth clearing up the name first: this is the Mary Celestia, not the famous ghost ship Mary Celeste found abandoned in the Atlantic. The confusion is understandable, since this blockade runner sailed under aliases including “Marie Celeste” to evade Union spies. She was British built, fast enough to outrun Union ships at around 17 knots, and went down in about eight minutes after striking a reef just off the South Shore. The only casualty was the ship’s cook, who went back for his belongings.
The iconic paddle wheel is still recognizable, one frame standing upright out of the sand like a miniature Ferris wheel in about 55 feet of water. I was told this is the only fully intact paddle wheel on any diveable shipwreck. This is a wreck that has had over a century and a half to become part of the reef, and it has. The coral coverage on the paddle wheel and across the structure was impressive. Most of the wreck is spread out and deteriorated, but the paddle wheel alone is worth the dive.
Visibility was poor, maybe 20 to 30 feet. This site rarely has clear water.

The Caraquet 

The Caraquet was a 350-foot steamer ship that wrecked on Bermuda’s coral reefs on June 25, 1923. It was a British mail and passenger ship and luckily all passengers were rescued in the disaster. 

Today, the Wreck of the Caraquet is a sprawling dive site with wreckage spread across the seafloor in around 40 feet of water. Although much of the wreck has been salvaged or battered by storms and saltwater for a century, there are still lots of very cool things to see. Four massive boilers are the most recognizable feature. They are large enough that a diver can pass through them in a large pipe. There is also a huge anchor, the anchor winch, and tons of other ship remnants. 

Fish life was nothing too spectacular, but the clear water and cool ship parts made it a great dive. Visibility here was over 100 feet and there was no current or surge. 

The King George

The King George is a steel hulled dredge sunk in the 1930s, sitting upright in shallow water. This wreck is absolutely packed with life. Schools of jacks and other fish drift in and out, and the wreck is a nursery ground for juvenile reef fish. There are tons of cool swim throughs and opportunities to enter the wreck. It is an easier, shallower wreck than the Hermes, which makes it a good example of how Bermuda layers wrecks across every depth and difficulty level

The water was chilly with lots of cold, nutrient rich currents mixing with the warmer surface waters. We had ~20ft visibility and it was quite silty. On the dive we spotted a small group of juvenile spotted drums on the sand next to the wreck. Also, several trunkfish, lobster, groupers, angelfish, and tons of other types of fish.

North Rock

North Rock is a gorgeous reef system with several large coral areas that are like an underwater playground for scuba divers. Swim-throughs are everywhere and the corals are healthy and dense. Clouds of reef fish and soft corals sway in the gentle surge. The site sits far out on the reef line and shows you exactly why ships kept hitting this place: the reef rises from around 45 ft of water to within a few feet of the surface, far from land, invisible to anyone navigating by sight in earlier centuries. Visibility was easily 100 feet, and this was one of the best dives of the trip.

Hog Breaker

Hog Breaker is named for precisely what it does to hulls. These were the dives where the geology of the Triangle made the most visual sense. Large rock outcroppings covered in corals come right up to the surface. These are surrounded by pinkish white sand that perfectly frame the reefs. We speared two lionfish here, which were later fried up for one of the best fish meals I have eaten. Visibility was amazing and my favorite part of the dive was spotting the schools of fish taking refuge from the surge behind the breakers.

Leamington Caves

Leamington Caves is an incredible coastal cave system located beneath a vacation rental home in Bermuda. Before my trip, I spent a night watching travel videos from Bermuda and one that caught my eye was about these amazing caves. I had no idea I would actually be able to dive them. The cave has beautiful formations of stalagmites and stalactites, jutting out from the ceiling and the floor. A well-maintained path leads down into the caves, and the above water areas are as beautiful as the below the turquoise surface. Usually the water is gin-clear, but again with the recent storms, there was a high amount of mixing between fresh and seawater and this reduced the visibility, adding a waving mirage of a halocline near the surface. It was still incredible diving, and was a highlight of the trip. 

After a week of diving here a pattern becomes clear. These ships did not vanish into another dimension. They hit a reef. The reef is still there. The wrecks are still there. You can touch them.

The Bermudian reefs that sank them

Here is the part that turns the Bermuda Triangle from a mystery into a geography problem.

Bermuda sits on top of an extinct volcanic seamount that rises from a deep ocean basin to within feet of the surface. The volcano itself died about 30 million years ago. What you see today, the green islands and pink sand beaches, is a thin cap of limestone built on top of the dead volcano by coral over geological time.

That coral cap is the reason for everything else.

Bermuda has the northernmost coral reef system in the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the largest. The reef extends miles out from the islands in every direction, with much of it sitting just below the surface where charts often did not show it in earlier centuries. For four hundred years, ships sailing the Gulf Stream from the Caribbean toward Europe routinely passed within sight of Bermuda. The same current that makes the reef possible also pulled ships toward it. Many of them hit reef they could not see in time and went down within sight of land. North Rock and Hog Breaker, two of my clearest dives, are exactly this kind of hazard: reef that rises out of deeper water far from any shore.

This is not paranormal. This is geology and ocean physics. The current pushes the ships, the reef stops them. Bermuda is essentially a shipwreck factory.

The reef should not exist this far north. Most reef building corals need water above 20 degrees Celsius year-round, and Bermuda sits at 32 degrees north latitude, roughly the same as North Carolina. The reason it survives is the Gulf Stream, which delivers warm Caribbean water past Bermuda and keeps the surrounding ocean five to seven degrees warmer than it would otherwise be. Without the Gulf Stream there would be no coral reef and probably no Bermuda. The same current built the island and sank the ships.

The reef is genuinely healthy. This surprised me. I saw dense, living hard and soft coral across every site, with none of the bleaching and die-off I have watched spread across reefs closer to the equator. Bermuda’s reefs are some of the best protected in the Atlantic, and it shows underwater. Scientists believe that the corals in Bermuda are so hardy because they have evolved in a place that often has large temperature swings. Therefore, they are less likely to bleach when sea temperatures rise. Studies are being done on the corals in Bermuda to hopefully help foster resiliency to coral reef systems in other parts of the world. 

What I actually saw underwater

Let me be honest about the wildlife, because most destination writing will not be.

Bermuda is not a megafauna destination. I did not see sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, rays, or anything that would make a wildlife photographer book a flight on its own. If you are coming for big animals, this is the wrong island.

What Bermuda has instead is structure and abundance. Many of the reefs are thick with fish, especially parrotfish, which are everywhere and which matter more than they look. Parrotfish munch on coral and while doing so scrape algae off reefs. They excrete fine white and pink sand, and a healthy parrotfish population is one of the clearest signs of a reef that is being left alone to function. The corals were dense and varied, soft and hard species mixed together, with swim-throughs cut into the reef structure that were very fun to move through with a camera.

The visibility was the one frustration. It swung wildly, from a clean 100 feet at North Rock and Hog Breaker down to maybe 20 feet on the murkier inshore days. Bermuda does not have the reliable gin-clear water of the best Caribbean sites. When it is on, it is spectacular. When it is off, you work for your shots.

The pink sand is real, by the way. It is not a filter. It is sand made largely of crushed foraminifera shells, tiny single celled marine organisms whose calcium carbonate shells happen to be pink, mixed with the white carbonate the parrotfish produce. The result is the rose-tinted beach material Bermuda is known for, and it is even more striking under three feet of clear water than it is on the beach.

What nobody tells you about Bermuda

Two things genuinely surprised me, and both are worth knowing before you book.

First, Bermuda is not a Caribbean island. People assume it is, and it is not, in any sense that matters. It sits far out in the North Atlantic, roughly off the coast of the Carolinas, hundreds of miles from the Caribbean. It has modern infrastructure, British colonial heritage, pink limestone buildings, and a temperate climate that turns genuinely cool outside of summer. Nothing about it feels Caribbean except the color of the water. If you are picturing a laid-back island in the tropics, recalibrate.

Second, Bermuda is extraordinarily expensive. This is consistently ranked as one of the most expensive places to live on Earth, and as a visitor you feel it immediately. Day to day costs run roughly 20 to 40 percent above New York City. A two-tank dive runs between about 170 and 260 US dollars before gear rental. Meals, lodging, and transportation are all priced accordingly. None of this makes Bermuda not worth visiting, but go in with clear expectations and a real budget. This is not a cheap dive trip and it never will be.

The Bermuda Triangle theories, and what divers really think

For sixty years people have proposed explanations for the disappearances in this region. Here are the main ones, in rough order of how often they come up.

1. Magnetic anomalies. The theory is that the Triangle is one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north align, causing compass errors. In reality the magnetic declination here is small and would not meaningfully disorient a competent navigator. My own compass worked perfectly all week.
2. Methane hydrates. The theory is that frozen methane on the seafloor occasionally erupts, reducing water density and sinking ships. Methane hydrates are real and exist in many ocean regions, but there is no evidence of large-scale releases in the Triangle in modern history.
3. Rogue waves. Occasional waves of unusual height sink ships without warning. These are real and well documented across the Atlantic. They likely explain some incidents. They are not unique to the region and happen worldwide.
4. UFOs and extraterrestrials. Aliens are abducting ships and planes. I think you can guess where I land on this one.
5. Human error and weather. Most disappearances are explained by hurricanes, navigation errors, fuel exhaustion, mechanical failure, and the same ordinary causes that explain losses everywhere else. This is what nearly every serious investigator concludes from the actual case files.

Most divers I met in Bermuda hold roughly the same view. The Triangle is a real geographic region with real reefs and real wrecks. The mystery is mostly a marketing achievement of the 1960s and 1970s, layered onto a region that has been hard to navigate for legitimate reasons for centuries. The real story, that this small volcanic outcrop has been quietly accumulating four hundred years of maritime history on its surrounding reefs, is more remarkable than any conspiracy.

So is the Bermuda Triangle real?

Yes and no.

The geographic region exists. The shipwrecks are real, and I dived six of them. The reefs are real and remarkably healthy. The history of vessel and aircraft losses is real, though statistically not unusual for a stretch of ocean this heavily trafficked.

The mystery, in the sense most people mean it, is not real. There is no anomalous force pulling things into a void. There is a heavily trafficked stretch of ocean with treacherous reefs at its northern corner and a long history of human navigation errors compounded by weather, currents, and the absence of GPS for most of the relevant centuries.

I went down expecting something. I came up understanding something.

Would I go back?

Yes, but I want to be clear about why.

Bermuda is not the trip for big animal encounters, and it is not a cheap or tropical getaway. What it offers is something narrower and, for the right diver, more interesting: one of the best collections of accessible shipwrecks anywhere in the world, sitting on a healthy northern reef, with four centuries of history layered into the seafloor and a brand new dive festival trying to wake the place up.

If the festival grows, and if the island ever decides to point its considerable resources at the water around it, Bermuda could become a serious wreck diving destination. The wrecks are already there. They have been there the whole time. Most people just never had a reason to look down.

There is a real Bermuda underneath the mythology. It is more interesting than the mythology.

Frequently asked questions about the Bermuda Triangle

Where is the Bermuda Triangle?

The Bermuda Triangle is a region of the western North Atlantic Ocean roughly bounded by Miami, San Juan in Puerto Rico, and the island of Bermuda. It covers about 500,000 square miles. The Triangle is not officially recognized by any geographic body, and its exact boundaries vary depending on the source.

What does the Bermuda Triangle look like?

From above it looks like ordinary open ocean. Near Bermuda specifically, it looks like clear blue water, healthy coral reefs, and pink sand beaches. Underwater near Bermuda the region contains over 300 documented shipwrecks dating from the 1500s to the twentieth century, along with thriving reef ecosystems full of fish.

Can you dive in the Bermuda Triangle?

Yes. Bermuda sits at the northern corner of the Triangle and offers some of the best wreck diving in the Atlantic, with over 300 shipwrecks within recreational depth. Popular dive sites include the Hermes, the Marie Celeste, North Rock, and Hog Breaker. The first annual Bermuda Dive Festival was held to promote diving on the island.

How much does it cost to dive in Bermuda?

Bermuda is expensive. A two tank dive typically runs between about 170 and 260 US dollars before gear rental. Bermuda is one of the most expensive places in the world, with day to day costs roughly 20 to 40 percent higher than New York City, so budget accordingly for lodging, food, and transportation on top of diving.

Is Bermuda a Caribbean island?

No. Bermuda is in the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly off the coast of the Carolinas and hundreds of miles from the Caribbean. It has a temperate climate, British colonial heritage, and modern infrastructure. Other than the color of the water, it does not resemble a Caribbean island.

Do planes still fly through the Bermuda Triangle?

Yes. The region sits on major commercial flight paths between the United States East Coast, the Caribbean, Bermuda, and parts of Europe. Hundreds of commercial flights cross it every day with no unusual incident rate.

Did the Titanic sink in the Bermuda Triangle?

No. The Titanic sank in the North Atlantic about 370 miles southeast of Newfoundland, well north of the Bermuda Triangle. The two are unrelated despite being occasionally confused in popular media.

Why do eels go to the Bermuda Triangle?

European and American eels migrate to the Sargasso Sea, an area of the western North Atlantic that overlaps the Bermuda Triangle, in order to spawn and die. The spawning grounds were first identified about a century ago from surveys of eel larvae, but the migration was only directly confirmed in 2022, when researchers tracked adult European eels there using satellite tags. Even so, no one has ever observed the eels spawning or found their eggs in the wild, which keeps part of the mystery alive.

Is the Bermuda Triangle a myth?

The geographic region is real. The supernatural mystery is largely considered a myth by modern researchers. The term and its cultural significance date to a 1964 magazine article and a 1974 bestseller. Investigations have found no evidence of paranormal causation, and the loss rate is consistent with the heavy traffic the region carries.

About this article

I shot the underwater photographs in this article during a week diving Bermuda for the first annual Bermuda Dive Festival in May 2026, staying at the Hamilton Princess. I am an underwater photographer based in Denver, Colorado, shooting marine wildlife, wrecks, and commercial brand work. Image licensing and print inquiries are available message me on my contact page.

If you enjoyed this story, you might also like exploring some of my other underwater and conservation-focused work:

• If you are interested in underwater photography take a look a look at my How to Take Underwater Photos blog.
• Explore my Ocean Worth Saving series and my Baird’s beaked whales blog.
• For more travel and adventure stories read Polar Bears in the Arctic or Diving in Statia.
• Browse my collection of underwater photography prints and t-shirts.
• Sources used for this blog include; 
  • Go To Bermuda
  • Bermuda.com 
  • Bermuda Government Department of Environment
  • Dive Magazine 
  • Britannica
  • Live Science