In this paper, we have investigated the performance of underwater vertical wireless optical communication (UVWOC) link employing on–off key modulation in the presence of underwater turbulence, pointing errors and attenuation losses. The turbulence of the medium (assumed to be weak turbulence) has been modeled by employing the hyperbolic tangent log normal (HTLN) distribution. Temperature, pressure and salinity are parameters which can bring about variation of optical transmission characteristics with respect to depth of the ocean/sea. An in-depth study of optical transmission through vertical oceanic links requires the the underwater medium to be modeled as comprising of non-identical turbulent layers. Each of these independent and non-identical turbulence layers are modeled using the HTLN distribution function. The pointing error due to misalignment between source and detector is modeled using Rayleigh displacement pointing error. A novel closed-form expression to quantify the average bit error rate (BER) has been derived for single input single output (SISO) communication link. This expression has then been further generalized to make it applicable to the case of receive diversity schemes such as selection combining, majority logic combining and maximum ratio combining. The expression for the average BER associated with the UVWOC link for different pointing errors, different data rates and different types of ocean water has been determined. Novel closed-form expressions quantifying the outage probability and ergodic channel capacity have been derived for SISO and SC receive diversity schemes. The accuracy of all of the closed-form expressions derived in this paper have been validated using Monte-Carlo simulations.