#botfi

To those who said we wouldn’t be back, well, here we are, almost four years to the day, south east of Port Stanley and ready to resume the search for Admiral von Spee’s lost fleet from the Battle of the Falklands.

Things are very different from when we were last here.  Back then we had a small ship of trawler design called the Endeavour.  Now we have a much bigger vessel, the Seabed Constructor (check her out), the most advanced deep-ocean search-and-survey ship in the world.   Before we used a towed system;  a side-scan sonar fish at the end of 3 to 5 kilometres of cable, that we would send down to depths of over 2000 m and there we would hold at an altitude of just 30 to 45 m above seabed.  In Cape Horn seas this was white-knuckle stuff, get it wrong and we would drive the fish into the seabed and lose it.  The Seabed Constructor, by contrast, is equipped with a fleet of the most advanced Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) in the world.  We programme them to go where we want, we then release them and, two or three days later, they come back with data that we hope will contain what we are looking for, which we then go down and evaluate using our two ROVs (remote operated vehicles).

Why has it taken so long to return?  Assembling a fleet of AUVs takes time.  You can’t just walk into a store and order a pat of butter, a six-pack of suds and ‘oh, half a dozen AUVs please’.  These are ultra-sophisticated vehicles that are made-to-order at a cost of millions.  And then a special company - Ocean Infinity - had to be set up with a specific type of ship and a large team of highly-trained technicians.  And then, just when everything was up and running, other projects came up which prevented the resumption of the search for the World War One ships.  First there was the Indian Ocean hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and then there was the search for the lost Argentine submarine San Juan and, more recently, we were looking for Sir Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance beneath the ice of the Weddell Sea.     

But now we are back.

First light this morning we were in Port William (Port Stanley’s outer harbour) disembarking ‘1 pax’ for medical attention and sheltering from a Sea State 12 - that’s a hurricane to anybody not familiar with the Beaufort scale.  This was serious stuff. There is no Sea State 13.  Winds over 65 knots and gusting to much higher. Huge waves, sea white with foam, air full of driving spray.  Not nice.  But like every ship in the area, we were not so stupid as to be out there admiring it;  we saw it coming on the satellite weather feeds and so, like all the others, when the tempest was at its most furious we were tucked up like bugs in a rug in one of the many havens around the Falklands.

By mid-afternoon the storm was coming down and, anxious to be operational at first opportunity (because we only have a few days and so cannot waste a moment), we decided to put out for the site.  With the winds still pumping in from the west it was a downhill scud, and by midnight we were on station and somewhere within the arena where, on the 8th December 1914, the great battle had been fought.

As I write this we are hunkered down, nose into the wind, and waiting for the sea to go down so we can launch.  It is not that we cannot launch, we can, but if something goes wrong, we will not be able to recover.  And so we wait, poised.  As soon as we get ‘green light to go’, we will release the AUVs from over the stern and they will set out to search the bottom lands for the pride of the Kaiser’s navy, the great armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau.