Adam Riback has spent a lifetime thinking about what lies beneath the surface.
Growing up in Sea Gate, a small community on the western tip of Coney Island, Mr. Riback, 53, said he would spend hours gazing out at Gravesend Bay, thinking: “What’s underneath it? What’s down there?”
It wasn’t until decades later, when he happened upon a dive shop in Brooklyn, that he would find out.
Most New Yorkers probably don’t know it, but by some estimates there are about 5,000 shipwrecks scattered around the state’s shores, possibly one of the highest concentrations of wrecks in the world, according to one expert.
Since 1971, the New York City-based scuba diving club Big Apple Divers, has been plunging into the coastal waters, uncovering shipwrecks and an array of aquatic creatures — sharks, whales, sea horses, ocean sunfish — hidden from plain sight.
