La Famille Express Wreck

In 2004, in the midst

of Hurricane Frances, a privately-owned freighter broke loose from its mooring and drifted into the Caribbean Sea.

Today, the La Famille Express rests on a reef in a few feet of water, abandoned and desolate. It was built in 1952 by the Russian Navy as a cargo ship, the Fort Shevchenko. It was sold to an islander in the mid-1990s, but not before witnessing the Cuban Missile Crisis first-hand in 1962. Alone on the reef, rusting and decaying since the day it was wrecked, it serves as a visual landmark for boaters and a hidden attraction of the Turks and Caicos Islands.