sacrifi ces of their crew back

into the public eye.”

Last summer, Allen’s

crew used Petrel to locate

and photograph the USS

Indianapolis, sunk during

the last days of World War II

in the Philippine Sea. The

ship had just completed a

secret mission to deliver

parts for “Little Boy,” the

fi rst nuclear bomb dropped

in wartime. En route to safe

harbor in the Philippines, the

Indianapolis took two tor-

pedo shots from a Japanese

destroyer and went down

in just 12 minutes. While

300 crewmembers were lost

with the ship, a reported 900

went into the water. When

Navy search planes located

them four days later, only

316 had survived. (Quint, the

infamous captain from the

movie Jaws, told a harrow-

ing survivor’s account of bat-

tling weather, dehydration ...

and sharks.)

After covering a search

area over 600 square miles,

Petrel located the India-

napolis 18,000 feet below

the surface. Months later,

Petrel’s 16-member crew

used the same technologies

to locate the Lexington.

WHAT’S THE

FREQUENCY?

While the mission to locate

the Indianapolis lasted sev-

eral days and covered hun-

dreds of square miles, to fi nd

the Lexington, the Petrel

crew needed just one day.

Because she was sunk on

purpose by the Navy, Allen’s

team had an accurate report

of where the aircraft car-

rier went down. Scanning

a specifi c area of the Coral

Sea, Petrel covered around

18 nautical square miles.

“We located the Lexing-

ton on the fi nal line of the

fi rst day’s AUV search pat-

tern,” says Reams.

AUV stands for auto-

nomous underwater ve-

hicle, in this case a yellow

cigar-shaped Hydroid Re-
mus 6000. The 12-foot-
6-inch-long vehicle weighs
in at about 1,900 pounds and
can operate in depths over
19,600 feet for up to 22 hours.
While the Remus 6000 has
several state-of-the-art fea-
tures for navigation and com-
munications back to Petrel,
its most important technol-
ogy is its dual-frequency so-
nar. It uses side-scan sonar,
PHOTOS: COURTESY PAUL ALLEN which maps and records

The discovery of ships

such as the Lexington

bring their history and

the sacri ces of their crew

back into the public eye.”

“

The d The

suchsuch

bring tbring t

BOATINGMAG.COM | JUNE 2018 | 95