We found our first new wreck in March 2008, the Seacrest Drilling ship sunk in 1989. We thought we had found this one last year but it’s a nearly identical sister ship . see our wrecks page for details. The ‘real’ Seacreast is a great dive, she lies upside down in 74m but easily penetrated through the moon pool at 50m . The other wreck is on her port side in 48m.
In 2009 we’ll be looking for the Arosan Maru, pictured above. she was a ‘2A Class Japanese Cargo Ship’, one of 131 built badly in as little as 35 days and easy prey for Allied submarines
This one was torpedoed by USS Hardhead, another Manitwoc submarine, in April 1945.
We’ve got several very promising marks that line up nicely with the Hardhead’s. At 6886 tons and 140m x 18m she’ll be a great new dive in 50-70m.
We found this one in Feb 2009 in 55m, a big , big wreck badly broken up by Hardhead
On our April 08 search for the Araosan we found two new wrecks, the Akela and a wreck nicknamed the SS Carrie. both nice big virgin wrecks but not WW2 marus
We still haven’t dived the Kinrei Maru, a fleet tanker sunk by USS Hammerhead, although we have a mark less than a mile from the submarine’s co-ordinate - we’ll get round to it this year hopefully.
We have over 90,000 square miles of water in the Gulf, all less than 80m so it’ll be a while before we run out of new wrecks, I’m sure.
A long term project is to find the I-351 Japanese submarine, sunk by USS Bluefish, and thoroughly researched buy our very own US historian,Jim Kilcullen. She’s a long way out and a long way down but perhaps one day we can put an expedition together, any CCR divers want to try?
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