STATUS: The Aquila is on its way from Dutch Harbor and it looks like they will be arriving at Kiska August 10th or 11th. We have a satellite phone system that appears to be working, but have not yet tested transmission of photos and small video clips.
During sea trials they detected some vibration in pole mount and returned to Dutch to strengthen. On second trial at 4.5 knots it was good.
We have two video clips which hopefully will give an idea of what is happening. Grunion1 is at Dutch. Grunion2 is sea-trials. This is somewhat new so let me know what kind of problems you are having viewing them.
Just got email from Pete. Loads of birds and whales. Little rough. Everybody loves the High Def camera and the MacBook Pro. Other boats heading for Adak for crabbing which start the 15th.
RELATIVES OF CREW: Rhonda Raye and Vickie Rodgers have done a remarkable job in locating relatives of the crew. There are some rather moving situations. In one case a sister was in a convent and because the family didn’t know which one had been out of touch for some time. However, just after the family got the news on the search they got a call from the sister. You can imagine the response.
ANALYSIS: As has been pointed out our first objective is to locate the sub. Five ft of sub will show up as one pixel on a monitor. We are not going to get a lot of detail from the side scan and it is unlikely that we will be able to determine what happened.
Attached is annotated [by me] photo of a chart put together by Aiura the military commander of the Kana Maru. It shows the path of the Grunion and the location and direction of each of the six shots. The dotted line is sometimes a path of bubbles and the solid line is where the periscope was up and spotted. At the end of the path is where the 8cm shell hit the wave caused by the conning tower. From Aiura “confirmed direct hits and exploding sound was heard and then tremendous amount of dark brown liquid was flushing out from the sea.” From another witness that saw the explosion “after a while a black thin bar appeared on the surface then fell and submerged”
click to enlarge
Submariners: What hypothesis would be consistent with this communication? Those in the know tell us that the torpedoes were Mk 14-3, they go about 46 knots high setting, that a sub submerged goes about 9 knots. In addition the two translations we have of the explosion do not appear to be consistent with an exploding torpedo. If we can find one or two viable hypothesis we might be able to find support for one or the other with the side scan. Your thoughts could be very valuable in determining what we do if we find it.