2018 Northeast Diving Pioneer

John Moyer began diving on shipwrecks in 1975 and is a member of the Atlantic Wreck Divers Dive Club. He has made thousands of dives on wrecks in the US, Canada, and Great Britain including the USS Wilkes-Barre, SS Carolina, RMS Empress of Ireland, ironclad Monitor, German submarine U-869, US submarine S-16, and many more. He was one of the first Americans to dive on the German High Seas Fleet in Scapa Flow, Scotland and he led a team of divers that recovered a steering helm from the I.P. Goulandris off the New Jersey coast.

He has worked as an instructor at the Dive Shop of New Jersey and at Key West Divers in Florida. While in Key West, he was one of the first divers to use Tri-Mix for deep wreck diving. He has worked on the dive boats Ebbie III, Sea Lion, and Seeker.

Moyer first dove on the Andrea Doria in 1982 with a small group of sport divers and was part of the team that recovered the ship’s bell in 1985. He spent years researching the ship and traveled to Italy to meet with the ship’s officers who were on board the night of the collision. In 1993, he was granted an Admiralty Arrest in US Federal Court giving him exclusive salvage rights to the wreck and clear title to any artifacts he recovered. Later that year he led the team of divers that salvaged two 1,000-pound ceramic Gambone panels from the ship’s Wintergarden Lounge.

His dives have been featured in dozens of books, magazines, newspapers, and TV shows. He is co-author of the paper “The Decay of the Andrea Doria,” published by the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and he appears in the film Andrea Doria: Are the Passengers Saved?