Sonar Finds What May Be Lost Submarine

The Aquila, carrying more than a dozen crew members and sonar surveyors, set out from Dutch Harbor on Aug. 6, said Pete Lowney, a family friend from Newton who joined the crab fishing fleet in Dutch Harbor more than a decade ago. Lowney has fished king and snow crab for years under the Aquila's captain, Kale Garcia.

The conical volcanoes of the far western Aleutians seem to drop straight into the sea. Even in summer, rain, fog and vicious winds envelop the tiny islands.

For more than two weeks, the Aquila carefully towed a sonar cable from east to west and back again inside a 240-square-mile grid that the survey team had plotted using information from naval archives and the Kano Maru officer's account. The crew worked in shifts to keep the search going 24 hours a day, Lowney said.

Sonar images can deceive even those who interpret them for a living. Elongated boulders look like submarines; outcrops resemble ship's prows.

"It's a rocky seascape," said Art Wright, survey manager for Williamson. "We went over the areas several times to differentiate between rock and ship and look at things from three to four different aspects."

They looked first for the Japanese destroyer Arare, sunk by the U.S. submarine Growler, to test the sonar and see what a known wreck would look like against the seafloor. The sonar captured shapes that appeared to be two halves of the Arare, Wright said.

There were several false "eureka" moments, Lowney said.

"We put down the sonar and I thought I saw two destroyers and got excited," he said ruefully. "After that point, I stopped jumping to conclusions."

In mid-August, the sonar picked up a 290-foot-long object with the sharp angles and jutting shadows of something man-made wedged into a terrace on the steep underwater slope of the volcano.

The Grunion, however, was 312 feet long. The Williamson team believes the bow may have plowed beneath a mat of thick sediment, hence the apparent shortage of about 20 feet. Skid marks show the vessel slid to rest about 1,000 meters from the surface, Wright said. Over the years, earthquakes along the tectonic subduction zone could have piled on more debris, he said.

Wright, a retired Navy captain who has worked with Williamson since 1986, is 95 percent sure the shadowy images are those of the vanished sub. The Grunion is the only known sunken vessel in the area and the sonar captured the distinct outline of a submarine conning tower, he said.

The Abeles remain circumspect about the find, saying they need more proof of the vessel's identity.

"Although it's very encouraging at the moment, it's dangerous to say, 'Absolutely, we have it,'" Bruce Abele said in August during a brief stop in Anchorage after the three met the crew of the Aquila on Adak, 275 miles east of Kiska.

But they have enough faith in the wreck to send out a second expedition next summer, this time with a remote-controlled underwater camera to identify the vessel and try to reconstruct her sinking.