The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  After the long transit south to complete track-line 9 and to have a second look at the target we’d detected at the start of track-line 8, which turned out to be geology, it was the early hours of Friday 14 March before we were in a position to start searching for Sydney. The SM-30 sonar was three quarters of the way up track-line 10 when I got a call from Patrick that caused me to immediately change my plans and break off the search. The word from Patrick was that the public announcement about the discovery of Kormoran’s wreck was scheduled for Sunday, and that it would be announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd himself, flanked by the Chief of the Defence Force, the Chief of Navy and a defence minister.

  Seeing the importance the government was placing on this announcement, I decided to play it safe and get some high-resolution images of the wreck to confirm my original interpretation. I personally had no doubt the wreck was Kormoran and wrote this in my live log of the operations. However, if my identification of the wreck, based on imagery alone, was the basis for breaking this extremely important news to the country, I wanted to have the best possible evidence to support my interpretation. I wasn’t in the line of communication with the navy or the prime minister’s office. But I imagined that if I was, the first question I would be asked was: ‘David, are you sure you’ve got this right?’

  Running the two high-resolution lines past Kormoran’s wreck consumed twenty-one hours, but the time spent was well worth it. We came back with two terrific images, at 1,500-metre and 750-metre swaths, which were as good as any I’ve ever seen. Like a bird’s-eye view of an accident scene, they revealed the complete destruction of Kormoran’s back half, caused by simultaneous detonation of the 340 mines stowed on the mine deck. The final image was a stunning shot of her intact bow, which was only made possible by flying the SM-30 towfish incredibly close to the wreck and about fifty metres off the seabed. Afterwards, someone asked me to put this manoeuvre into perspective, and I could only say it was like threading a needle at a depth of 2,560 metres using a thread that was five miles long.

  Flying the towfish so close and so low accentuated the acoustic shadow emanating from the bow, similar to the way a light shining on an object from an angle will make the shadow behind the object stand out. My aim was to reveal the bow’s overall shape and I was delighted to see that it perfectly matched Kormoran’s flared design and raised forecastle deck. From the same image I was also able to accurately measure the wreck’s beam, which was important in distinguishing one ship from the other. I had the original builders’ plans of both ships and knew that Kormoran’s beam was 20.2 metres, while Sydney s, by comparison, was just 17.3.1 carefully took the measurements from a number of different points to be sure, but they were all the same: 20 metres breadth, 13 metres height and a length of 106 metres. The dimensions fitted Kormoran like a glove.

  Having prepared the high-resolution images and accompanying explanations for the prime minister’s press conference, we were able to get back to searching for Sydney. After completing track-line no. 10, we made a slow turn to starboard to run line 11, heading from north to south. The track-line progression was taking us to the east, into shallower water. This meant less time spent in turns, and together with the much shorter track-line length, the pace of the search had picked up, although it could never be described as fast. There was plenty of time to work on other tasks and to generally shoot the breeze. When Sunday morning, 16 March, rolled around, John Perryman and I were talking about the PM’s press conference, wondering what the public reaction would be to the news we had known for four days. I don’t know if it was a premonition, or because we were in a good rhythm with the SM-30 working really well, but I turned to John and said: ‘Watch, I bet we find Sydney while the PM is having his press conference.’ It was such an outrageous suggestion, John let it pass without comment.

  That same morning, at 07.05, the towfish had entered the search area on track-line 12, the third line in the search box I had designated for Sydney. This line was being run from south to north, and 7,400 metres of cable was deployed off the back of Geosounder. I was over at the chart table looking at a plot I had made on transparent Mylar of possible courses Sydney might have taken after the action. The sonar was currently passing through the zone I considered to be the highest probability, roughly midway between ten and fifteen nautical miles from where we’d found Kormoran, when John shouted out: ‘Oi! What’s that!’ I could hear in his voice, and see in the way he leaped out of his seat, that he was really excited by something. He had every right to be, because at that very instant the sonar was passing over the upright stern of Sydney.

  The sonar image was so perfectly and beautifully vivid, there was no need for interpretation. This wasn’t the geology that had fooled me earlier; it was a shipwreck, and as no other shipwrecks were missing in this area, it had to be the Sydney. The distinctive image of a ship-shaped target with a well-defined acoustic shadow was only seconds old, but with one look at the monitor I knew it myself and screamed: ‘That’s it, we’ve found her!’ The moment of discovery was as instantaneous as that. At 11.03 Australian Western Standard Time, the sixty-six-year search for HMAS Sydney was over.

  Like little kids on Christmas morning, John and I started jumping around the room. As excited as we’d been at finding Kormoran just four days before, this was so much more. After the years of struggle to convince the navy, the government and countless naysayers, and the difficult start to the search, perhaps I should have felt relief, or even vindication. I felt neither of those things, although I’m sure they added to the intensity of my emotions. I was just so incredibly happy that Sydney was found, and looking back I remember it as the single most exhilarating moment of my professional life.

  I looked at my watch and couldn’t believe we were so close to finding Sydney at the exact moment the prime minister was addressing the press, as I had mischievously suggested to John. Imagine everyone’s reaction had Kevin Rudd started his statement by saying he was there to announce the finding of Kormoran, but as I stand in front of you, I’ve just heard from David Mearns on the Geosounder that he has also found the Sydney. It was a delicious thought that was still going through my head when I called Ted Graham. He was walking through the streets of Canberra having just left the prime minister’s office when I rang him on his mobile. I asked him if it was possible to get the PM and the press back to reconvene the press conference. When he asked me why I said, ‘We just found the Sydney. She’s sitting upright in a small debris field. The Prime Minister or anybody else can announce it. We have found HMAS Sydney.’ Ted was so choked with emotion that all he could say was ‘Thank you, David.’

  Once the good news was relayed to the prime minister’s office, it was agreed that the announcement about Sydney would be made the following day. That left me with just enough time to collect a number of high-resolution images of the wreck for confirmation, as I’d done with Kormoran. Fuelled by the adrenalin of our amazing success, everyone on board the Geosounder worked round the clock to get the imagery I wanted to accompany the PM’s official statement. Three sonar passes were made at increasingly narrow swaths, with the SM-30 set at 750 metres swath for the final pass, which produced one of the best sonar images of a deep-water shipwreck I had ever seen. The detail in the acoustic shadow was remarkable, and it confirmed beyond doubt that the wreck was a heavily damaged warship with a nasty fracture where its bow had once been. Within the debris field there was a large square sonar target, which I tentatively identified as the remains of Sydney’s bow.

  And so on Monday morning, the press reassembled in the prime minister’s courtyard to hear Kevin Rudd say: ‘This is an historic day for all Australians and it’s a sad day for all Australians, as we confirm the discovery of HMAS Sydney. This is a day which begins a process of closure for many families of the crew of Sydney. It’s also a time for the nation to reflect on the bravery of all those who gave their lives in defence of their country, in this particularly bloody and brutal naval engagement.’

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p; When the floor was opened to journalists, the first question put to the PM was: ‘Considering there hasn’t been any photography taken yet of the wreckage, how has it been confirmed that it is the Sydney?’ Rudd’s reply was that the government had sought confirmation from the navy before proceeding with this morning’s announcement. He added: ‘It’s very important that these things are got right.’ He then asked navy chief Vice Admiral Russ Shalders to provide a fuller explanation. Shalders described how we’d used the high-resolution sonar images to compare the dimensions of the wrecks to the drawings, and how the distinctive profile of Kormoran’s bow was an important factor. He finished by telling the reporters: ‘David Mearns has indicated that there is no doubt that this contact is the Sydney.’

  Because the prime minister’s announcement about the Sydney had occurred the day after he’d made the exact same announcement about Kormoran, it left everyone with the impression that we had located the two wrecks on consecutive days. While that wasn’t true – in fact it took sixty-seven hours of searching before Sydney was found – people could still scarcely believe the speed with which the two wrecks had been discovered and positively identified. Australians, after all, knew Sydney as this great, unresolved mystery, in which one of the central question marks was that nobody knew where the wreck was located. Wasn’t Sydney supposed to be the needle in a thousand haystacks; the wreck that was truly unfindable?

  The significance of what we had achieved, and the overwhelming public reaction to our success, was apparent as soon as the Geosounder arrived in Geraldton after the end of the search phase of the project. Because of its proximity to where the battle had been fought, and the fact that it was home to a prominent memorial to Sydney and her 645 men, Geraldton was as closely intertwined with the cultural history of Sydney as any other community in Australia, and its residents turned out in droves to celebrate our success.

  A media conference was held the following morning, Good Friday, at the Geraldton-Greenough Chambers for us to present our findings from the search phase, and an outline of our plans for the visual investigation of the wrecks by ROV. Although I had been posting regular technical updates on a search diary for the HMA3S website, which racked up an amazing 12.5 million page views from 3.2 million unique viewers, this was our first opportunity to discuss the search in person and to show the packed audience how the wrecks had been identified from the sonar images alone. One point I especially wanted to make, in order to prepare people for the type of photographs they would soon be seeing from the ROV survey, was that I expected to find both wrecks in a badly damaged condition. My primary concern was for the relatives and friends of the Sydney crewmen, who would be understandably upset by photos that showed the torpedo and shellfire damage inflicted on the ship.

  Ten days earlier, I hadn’t thought we’d be in this position. But now, with both wrecks found and identified well ahead of schedule, we actually had a reasonable amount of time left in the budget to visually investigate them. The purpose and scope of that investigation was still an open question, however. While some people were calling for a full-blown forensic examination to conclusively determine what caused Sydney to sink, HMA3S only had a mandate to visually identify the wrecks, which if taken literally could be achieved by a single ROV dive on each, lasting an hour or two at most. The navy and HMA3S clearly needed some guidance about striking the right balance. All the good achieved by finding the wrecks would be quickly undone if the ROV investigation became politicized.

  The decision in the end was to follow my recommendation to comprehensively document both wrecks and their debris fields, but to stop short of trying to answer specific questions about cause or blame. As this might be the only time a survey vessel equipped with an ROV capable of reaching both wrecks was available along this coast of Australia, I believed we did have a responsibility to use that asset to its full capability. I also suggested that certain parts of the wrecks should be filmed and photographed in greater detail to allow direct comparison against the German accounts. However, we did not have the equipment or personnel, or the mandate, for a true forensic examination in keeping with the legal standard expected by a court. Our job was to be evidence gatherers, not judge or jury.

  The changeover for Geosounder, involving off-loading the Williamson equipment and mobilizing a 3,000-metre-rated ROV named Comanche, was meant to take two to three days. However, any hopes I had of a smooth ROV mobilization were dashed the evening before we were scheduled to leave port when I got a call saying that the special HMI lighting system I had brought to be installed on Comanche had suffered a catastrophic electrical failure. It turned out that a simple mistake by a junior technician had led to the lights being wired incorrectly, which in turn had caused a high-voltage short circuit that had completely destroyed the twin 400-watt light heads. Losing this expensive and vital piece of equipment was painful enough, but what made it worse was that this disaster triggered a soul-destroying stream of related electrical failures that kept us in port for six more days and once again put the project in serious jeopardy. Day after day the ROV crew fought a losing battle to trace the source of the problem as component after component failed and either had to be replaced or eliminated. These included a camera pan-and-tilt mechanism, countless thruster motors, the starboard seven-function manipulator, the scanning sonar, the sound velocity profiler, the bathymetric survey system, a bulkhead connector, a gyro power supply board, a drive motor for the tether management system, and both the primary and spare rotary slip ring units without which the ROV would not work.

  To the credit of everyone involved, they never gave up, and the Comanche was eventually repaired, allowing us to get under way on 29 March. Nevertheless, the episode left us with strained relationships on the vessel, a severely diminished ROV and a very anxious ROV crew. In fact, the only reason we left the day we did was because we were forced out of port by the second tropical cyclone to plague our project. This one was named Pancho, and like Ophelia, it steered its way south directly towards the wreck site, arriving there as a Category 2 storm on the morning of 29 March. Like a bully standing in a narrow hallway, Pancho stopped us from steaming north while it moved menacingly to block our path. Its long reach meant we were no longer safe tied up in Geraldton, so we were advised to head out to sea. Unfortunately, the weather was also too rough to make the necessary test dive of the ROV in deep water west of the Abrolhos. Pancho appeared to have us snookered.

  By now my frustration level was off the scale. We had lost a big chunk of time with the malfunctioning ROV and were looking at another extended period of downtime because of Pancho. I had bought some fishing equipment in Geraldton, which provided the crew with a few hours of fun trying to hook and haul in some of the dolphin fish that were always lurking on the port side of Geosounder. The fishing was a little diversion to lift everyone’s spirits and to help restore lost morale. We did our best to try and complete the ROV test dive during a lull in the weather, but when that failed, I asked Geosounders new master, Deland Van Wieringen, to get under way to the wreck site at reduced speed. I was taking a calculated gamble that we could deal with the worst of Pancho as we moved north while it slid by us to the south, and that upon reaching the wreck site the Comanche would pass its required 500-metre test dive and be allowed to continue down to Sydney.

  After a slow and rough transit north, the Geosounder arrived at the wreck site in the early hours of 1 April with surprisingly good conditions for a launch. The aim was to deploy the ROV to a depth of 500 metres for an hour or so of testing before descending deeper. Sixteen days had passed since finding Sydney; as the delay got longer, more and more people were asking when we would produce photographs of the wreck. Was this the day we would finally set our eyes on the ‘Grey Gladiator’ and put the minds of the relatives to rest? At only forty metres depth we got the answer: not a chance.

  When I heard the catalogue of problems with the ROV, I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. It sounded as if every item that was supposed
to have been fixed before leaving Geraldton had somehow managed to break again. Thrusters, scanning sonar, bathymetric sonar, gyro power supply: all malfunctioning. We had gone through some really low moments during the search and ROV mobilization, but the next two days were the absolute worst. To add to our misery, the brief window of decent weather was gone, replaced by 30–35-knot winds and three-metre swells. I wasn’t the superstitious type, but it was hard not to feel that there was some greater force preventing us from completing the job.

  The morning of 3 April broke with promise that a dive might be possible. The weather had improved and the ROV, while not fully functional, was in a reasonable state for testing. Normally it was the decision of the ROV supervisor whether a dive could continue, or whether it would have to be aborted in case of a serious problem. However, because of all the delays we had experienced, it was agreed that this critical call would be mine to make. It was also agreed that if the 500-metre depth test was successful, we would continue straight to the wreck at 2,500 metres without having to surface again.

  It didn’t take long for me to have to wield my client’s prerogative, as during the deck checks — before the vehicle had even touched the water – the main camera pan-and-tilt unit failed. Although this meant we’d be diving with a fixed camera, one that couldn’t be mechanically pointed at an object, I decided to press on and gave the okay to proceed. The vehicle was in the water at last, but at 100 metres depth we suffered another failure, causing my heart to sink. This one was a potential showstopper, and I couldn’t see how we’d ever reach 2,500 metres at this rate. The chain that drove the level-winding mechanism on the main lift umbilical winch had snapped, and with no spare chain or links on board, I thought we were stuffed. Fortunately, a fix was found by jury-rigging a chain hoist that would manually shift the level-wind into position as cable was paid out or hauled in. Crisis averted, at least temporarily.