The man responsible for converting Gran Roque from a heap of scrap metal into a marine experiment said that in a few years the boat will become a haven for sea life and coral formations and an amusement park for divers.

"In three years it will be teeming with fish and coral," said Cesar Navas, a deeply tanned scuba diving instructor who convinced Venezuelan authorities that the ship would be better off lying 98-feet under water.

"Instead of dying as a rat-infested piece of junk, we are turning it into a beautiful artificial reef which will shelter sea life and also will be a divers' playground," he said as he prepared to sink the boat in the waters off Aragua state, about 110 miles west of Caracas.

The 98-foot (30-meter) long, 217-tonGran Roque was built in Venezuela's state-owned shipyards in 1973 to serve domestic ports, but lack of maintenance finally crippled the vessel for good seven years ago.

Abandoned alongside the dock, the tug became a haven for the homeless and filled with trash and graffiti until Navas' team took over the task of cleaning it up before sending it to the bottom of Guabina Bay.

BLAZING FAREWELL

Navas said he wanted to give "a decent send-off" to a ship that had a mostly peaceful life except for one moment of glory in 1976 when its crew rescued tourists whose hydrofoil collided with a sperm whale off Margarita Island.

Gran Roque went to the bottom with a powerful boom as 44 pounds (20 kg) of explosives placed by a specialist Army diver team ripped open its rusted hull. In less than a minute, the ship sank to the bottom of the bay, part of the Henri Pittier National Park.

Navas, owner of an environmentally friendly hostel for divers near Guabina, hopes the reef will attract much needed tourist dollars for the impoverished region, whose income has been diminished by the sharp economic recession in the world No. 5 oil exporter.

Venezuela never made tourism a priority and has largely failed to capitalize on its 1,366 miles of Caribbean coastline. While foreigners flock to the small neighboring islands of Curacao and Aruba, Venezuela's economic and political troubles and lack of infrastructure and advertising have kept many potential tourists away.

DIVERS' ATTRACTION

But Navas hopes the artificial reef will help change that, saying such reefs tend to attract high-spending divers.

"They are a kind of tourist that spends a lot of money, as opposed to backpackers. Gran Roque ... will also provide opportunities for sport fishing because it will be used as shelter by the fish," he said.

The president of Canada's Artificial Reef Society of British Columbia, Tex Enemark, said that the ship will likely attract vacationing divers.

Such artificial reefs "are very interesting things to study from an environmental point of view, to watch how are they colonized, how they turn from bare pieces of metal into complex ecosystems," he said in a telephone interview.

Two older sunken ships nearby offer divers more wrecks to explore; one of them sank in the shallow waters of nearby Isla Larga during World War II.

Navas, self-appointed commander of Venezuela's sunken fleet, grins as he explains his final objective.