Search For The USS Grunion

Via NavSource, I stumbled across a great story -- the children of the last CO of USS Grunion (SS 216) are looking for the eternal patrol location of their father's ship, lost off of Kiska Island in July 1942.

For quite some time, the manner of Grunion's loss had been a mystery. Then, several years ago, a Japanese military buff uncovered and translated some documents that provided a clue to what happened during Grunion's last action. Armed with this new information, LCDR Abele's sons arranged to get the services of a vessel equipped with side-scan sonar to look for the sunken sub northeast of Kiska. They're up there right now; you can check out their progress on their blog.

I wish them all the best.

Update 1747 16 August: They're reporting today that they might have found something...

On our 1000 and 500 meter swaths on our first possible target, X nm north of McArthur Reef, we found a submarine shaped hard target about 320 feet long and 12 meters [39 ft] wide. [the Grunion was 312 ft long with beam of 27 ft] On a low altitude pass the shadow reveals a possible conning tower and periscope. Target is sitting upright on the bottom at the base of the slope in [over 2000 ft] water depth. Considering all the information we have, this is almost certainly the Grunion.

They have pictures, too.