FIELD OF DREAMS

TWO HURRICANES, SIX WRECKS AND A HANDFUL OF ISLANDERS ARE SHAPING THE BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS’ FUTURE UNDERWATER

- BROOKE MORTON

Chris Juredin has a most unusual late-night shopping habit.

For many mainlanders, bedtime scrolling leans toward Amazon or perusing real estate listings on Zillow. But the owner of Commercial Dive Services and the recreationally focused We Be Divin’—both based on the British Virgin Island of Tortola—is fixated on boats. Big ones. Big, abandoned wrecks that he and his team of commercial divers can clean up and sink to become habitat, to benefit fish and tourism.

It’s a massive undertaking, but one that he’s had plenty of time to think about.

“I’ve been trying since the early 2000s to encourage the government to let me build artificial reefs,” says the tanned South African wearing a “Black Sheep” ball cap when we meet for coffee.

While Juredin and his reef-centric peers worked on the government, someone with nearly as much money and power as a small country entered the picture.

Local private-island owner Richard Branson—the force behind Virgin Atlantic airline—got involved with BVI’s first artificial reef project in 2017 when a friend persuaded him to help repurpose a boat called the Kodiak Queen, a former U.S. Navy fuel barge that survived Pearl Harbor. (The boat went on to have several lives before 2010’s Hurricane Earl ended its seaworthy days.) Branson and his team of many, including artists and entrepreneurs, helped it be reborn as a wreck off Virgin Gorda.

Kodiak Queen was also Juredin’s first time taking on the dirty, behind-the-scenes work of prepping a ship to become a reef.

“Keeping it afloat and securing it for the artists to work on was difficult. At any time, it could have sunk,” he says. “It would have been cost-prohibitive to resalvage it again. It was stressful. Very stressful.”