The 60m-long, former tanker Hephaestus, which was scuttled at Xatt l-Aħmar just 30m off Gozo’s south-east coast on 29 August had run aground on rocks in St Paul’s Bay in Malta three and half years ago and subsequently written off.
The US eastern seaboard, along the New York and New Jersey coasts, is littered with ships that sank due to collision. Larry Cohen and Olga Torrey present several of these wreck sites, which wreck divers enjoy diving.
Interview and text by Mimo Moqvist
Translation edited by G. Symes
“Yes, it is actually a slightly special story. We were really looking for a completely different wreck, from the 16th century. As early as 2005, I got in touch with a man whose father had found a wreck outside Dyngö when he was fishing for trout,” said von Arbin.
The father who found the wreck was no longer alive, but the son tipped off von Arbin about the find and told him that he had material that von Arbin and his team could see.
The USS Jacob Jones was the first American destroyer ever to be sunk by enemy fire. After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, Jacob Jones was sent overseas. On 6 December, Jacob Jones was steaming independently from Brest, France, for Queenstown, when she was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-53 with the loss of 66 men out of a crew of 150. The vessel sank in eight minutes without issuing a distress call.
There are not many wrecks in the fjord of Gullmarn. What wrecks there are here should, of course, be slightly inaccessible, at a depth of 64m. For a long time, our dive team had talked about going down to the Hudson plane hidden in the fjord. Now, the wait was finally over
The survival of a vessel such as this is extremely rare, and there are no known wrecks of seagoing ships from the 11th to the 14th centuries in English waters. The discovery makes this the earliest English designated wreck site where hull remains can be seen, Bournemouth University writes.
The shipwreck was preserved due to unique environmental factors, according to maritime archaeologists now excavating and analyzing the site.
A joint group of GUE divers from Norway, Sweden and Finland, led by project leader Gunnar Midtgaard, documented the wreck of the Blücher in Norway, and its condition, during the summers of 2011 and 2012. Mattias Vendlegård, who served on the photo team during the project, has the story.
The shipwreck, which has been found to be about 375 years old, was found nearly 36 feet beneath the surface of the Trave River - a river in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, which flows into the Baltic Sea at Travemünde. The ship was found during routine measurements of the river by the local waterway and shipping authority which detected an anomaly at the river bottom using a multibeam echosounder.
The Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas (Our Lady of Wonders) sank with a cargo of gold, silver, and gems on the western side of the Little Bahama Bank in 1656. The Spanish galleon was part of a fleet sailing to Spain from Havana with royal and privately-consigned treasures from the Americas. Failing to navigate shallow waters, however, it collided with the flagship of the fleet and hit a reef. Of the 650 people on board, only 45 survived.
The waters running north to south from the Long Island coast to northern New Jersey are nicknamed “Wreck Valley” by local divers. Larry Cohen and Olga Torrey share the stories of some of the war shipwrecks found in these waters, located off the US northeastern coast.
