Graham Hall on Navigation
There were several ways of finding a wreck. In the early days we didn’t have a lot of technical equipment so the easiest way to find it was go out there and just see if you could see a wreckage coming up and oil coming to the surface and you sort of followed the oil trail to its start and that was usually where the wreck was. You’d then locate it with an echo sounder. We’d steam about over it, working out before we did so that there was enough water to do so.
If it was just below the surface, we obviously didn’t want to wreck our own ship, so we’d go on there.
The ‘Winston Churchill’ was one of the first ships that was fitted with an Aztec-type side scan sonar.
It had three windows in the bottom of the ship which would send signals out, sound signals like that and we had a recorder on the bridge which we could see if it could pick up anything, so actually we could, with this, locate ships.
It was a bit rudimentary and it wasn’t terribly effective, but it was Admiralty system that had been used since the War and we did find some wrecks with that.
More modern ships now have very much more sophisticated sonars and radars and underwater things to find things with but in those days, it was fairly rudimentary and that’s how we found them.