Deepest shipwreck found by Vulcan's R/V Petrel

I'm Rob Kraft and I'm Paul Mayer so we've got a fletcher-class destroyers here this wreck is either the Johnston or the hole we believe this to be the Johnston and there are two specific reasons why we believe that and we're going to get into those as we go through the video so this is our 6000 meter contour we did along the edge of the trench and we had a single run of the AEV going up that that trench and it aborted halfway through the line and actually you managed to pick out a shipwreck on the spiral lock yeah we ran another mission over there and you know we ran at 6,000 meters knowing we could see a little bit deeper and this is what we saw so the location of this wreck geographically is is in the southern part of the you know where this battle took place and so this is one of the reasons that we believe this is the Johnson because she sink later after how well did so we've got two funnels to funnel liners this is the the first one this is the second funnel we came across and you can see the shape the top of this funnel here and this is indicative of a fletcher-class destroyers I mean you can see it's very distinctive shape you you so this is the first of two 5-inch mounts that we found and as we're getting closer here one of the problems we had on this time is that we found the ROV was slightly negative it was our first deep dive in a long time yeah I wouldn't say slightly negative she was really negative and yeah this was 60 220 meters and once we gain that boynes here that we lost that buoyancy the problem was we had to keep thrusting the vehicle up to keep it off the bottom and so at times you may see that there's kind of this dust cloud that approaches from under the vehicle and around us so we didn't have much time to spend on each one of these items that we came across and another reason why we don't like to dive the vehicle negative would be we might lose it well yeah so this is the first one we came across yeah and this is the this is the number three gun on a fletcher-class destroyer and you'll see is we will work our way around this gun and you'll see that this particular gun sits on top of a you know a pedestal or a raised area so it has external vertical sides next to the mount itself so it's not down into the deck right and that's another reason why we'd know it wasn't the same you'll be Roberts because that was a destroyer escort it's five-inch mounts were all flush mounted to the deck yeah that's correct and so any of the framework you see around a destroyer escort would have interior you know ribbing you'd see that the that was interior space is and not exterior like you'll see on this particular gun and so here we're starting to come around to the the side of the gun where you can see that you're going to have exterior surfaces on this mount you can see the barrel lying down in the mud and that vertical piece that you see in the background there is attached to a catwalk that goes forward to the torpedo launcher that sits in front of the number three gun on the fletcher-class and you're going to want to note that the the color or lack thereof of these exterior surfaces and also just there in the middle of this particular gun mount you can see it's damaged pretty badly but these are dogs for a watertight door that would sit right there so you know that's an external surface and that's an important point the hole have a dazzle paint job yeah she was in measure 32 1d so she was in dazzle and this particular surface here and that gun on the I believe the port side should be entirely black yeah and so you know we'll let everybody look up their own versions of the dazzle and you can see Worth Johnston basically had two different tones of blue yeah she was a measure 21 no dazzle so you you would see pretty much solvent colors like you do right here see there you can do over on the the lower left you can start to see this little dust cloud that's been following us and that's a good view of the catwalk and the support yeah so we've only found one propshaft on this dive and one propeller for that matter wasn't it yeah just the one which makes you think that there is more wreckage out there that we didn't see and we couldn't do high frequency here because it wouldn't show the deaths because it would be - yeah I have too much yeah the the altitude would be so high that we'd get nothing on a range scale so doing HF in here is is not going to happen however we do have a target down to the south so next time I get back over here with would certainly want to look at that and I think we can reach that and this piece of debris here is just some deck deck plating yeah it's it's the only recognizable piece of horizontal deck that we were able to find you can see the bit in the fairlead there so we we know that this is kind of the weather deck area and it's the only piece that we found and again there's no evidence of any dazzle page up so this is the first of two 5-inch gun mount tops or the covers that are on top of the guns this one is inverted but in the top right hand corner there you can see the access or the hatch for the the gun captains is hatch and then we just kept moving along and this is another just a large piece of debris if we were moving along we were basically picking out large sonar targets from that the ROV sonar right and this was just another large piece it had red bottom paint on it so we know it was below the waterline yeah and this this wreck that we found is there is no hull structure intact that we could find I mean this could this wreck is completely decimated there is it is just debris there is no hole structure this is the mast I know somebody at the NH HC was counting the rungs on it trying to differentiate between Thompson and Hall but it was inconclusive and then we just have another large portion of internal debris I've it's painted white so we just assumed that see inside the ship this is an interesting piece of wreckage we're not sure what this is hopefully someone out there would be able to help us identify this one and there there is glass in some of these holes yeah it makes it a little strange you would think it would be exterior if it's if it's got glass in there but I would hate to speculate we try not to say anything you know that gets us in trouble right but somebody with familiar with the Fletcher's I don't know what this is we the speculation we have done I think it's steering steering gear possibly oh here we go and there's our little dust cloud following us so this is another far bet this could have been a five inch gun or a 40-millimeter Bofors mount we are unclear but we don't think it was them out for the torpedo because they were the torpedo launcher because they were a flush mounted to the deck I don't think they had that structure underneath so much for speculation huh it is a bar bet but we do not know which which one or what it was for I'm gonna go with that okay so the video is a little bit out of order here when we came across this track in the mud was one of the funnels but I just wanted to point it out that something appears to have slipped further down into the Philippine Trench here but this is the deepest part of our dive and we really didn't want to go any deeper no we were we were deep enough and you know we could have followed that thing for I don't know how many meters down there but it was it was getting deeper faster exceeded our comfort level especially Pat as if he was driving yes and here's a bit of aluminum debris showing one of the colors of a blue yeah again a blue no sign of dazzle this is just one of the holder for the cork floater nets and then we came across a bunch of debris we actually came across the one earlier but this is just a better view coming from the opposite direction yeah coming into view you can see the the second of the 5-inch gun mount covers and this right there in the lower left is the gun captain splash shield and this was kind of a sticking point for us to begin with because we couldn't find any photos of Johnston that had a blast shield on one of the 5-inch guns yeah there's very few photos of Johnson or confirmed photos of Johnston and I did reach out to the Johnston organization to see if they had any photos but I haven't heard back and again I mean we have no idea which mount this would have been on but again that's you've got a consistent color on the top of this yeah again a dazzle you would have had varying colors yeah and this is approaching the second five inch mount that we found and I don't think we ever concluded if this was a deck mounted gun or one that's on the upper level yeah difficult to say it does appear that the you know some of the sides that you have there are interior bulkheads but again it's it's difficult to say on this when you can see the barrel they're lying and they in the mud and you can see the bottom end of the turret there just to your right hand side covered in some mud but again lack of color or all consistent you you so here we are we're working our way around this this gun mount and certainly a change in color here on the right there it looks like it might be some of the exterior you know the near side over to the left would suggest that you know you can see the framework or the ribs there that that may suggest interior bulkhead around the bottom here you can see this lip that wraps right around both sides I don't I'm not sure what that is yeah unclear so this is the final piece of debris that we came across just before recovering it looks like there's a curved could could be from a hatch there could be from another gun mount yeah we didn't didn't get a good shot of that so are we gonna go back I'm planning on it we have more to do there there's another target down there I want to go look at this is one of our longer videos we wanted to put out as much information as we could see if we could glean some assistance from our followers and have them provide opinions on what they think this wreck is we believe it to be Johnston let us know what you think yeah thanks for watching

Channel: GeekWire

Views: 225,255

Rating: 4.888133 out of 5

Keywords: shipwreck, World War II, deep sea, ocean floor, R/V Petrel, Paul Allen, Vulcan Inc.

Id: 324d24jyoeM

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 30 2019