Divers find more Pendleton wreckage

From Cape Cod Times: Divers find more Pendleton wreckage
CHATHAM — The waters off Cape Cod are known as a graveyard for ships that fail to round the peninsula's greedy, outstretched arm.

Now local divers and shipwreck enthusiasts have a watery destination that is both eerily familiar and brand new: a recently discovered section of the Pendleton, one of two large tankers that split in half off the Cape during a storm in February 1952.

The stern of the Pendleton, about a mile east of Monomoy Island, has long been a popular dive spot. The ship is famous not so much for its sinking as for the four Coast Guardsmen who braved 60-foot seas and fierce winds in a 36-foot motor lifeboat to rescue 32 of the ship's crew stranded on the stern. The rescue has been called the greatest small boat rescue in Coast Guard history.

When the Pendleton split in half, eight men, including the ship's captain, were stranded on its bow, which drifted south and eventually grounded near the Pollock Rip Lightship southeast of Monomoy. All the men onboard the bow section were lost. Only one frozen body was found when the Coast Guard and salvagers boarded the wreck a week later, according to "The Finest Hours" by Michael Tougias and Casey Sherman.

The bow of the Pendleton was eventually towed — first to New Bedford and then to New York City — to be cut up and sold as scrap metal. For a half century, the story of the 503-foot, 10,448-ton T-2 tanker's bow seemed complete.

Until now.

Chuck Carey, a 61-year-old Hyannis-based commercial real estate broker and shipwreck enthusiast, was searching the ocean bottom around Pollock Rip at the end of August with a sidescan sonar towed from his 29-foot catamaran.

"I happened to blunder right over it," he said this week about finding a 100-by-170-foot section of the Pendleton's bow in about 30 feet of water. From the sidescan imagery, Carey couldn't tell exactly what he was seeing, and at first thought it might have been a scallop dredge.

Once he and other divers explored the wreck, however, it was clear that the heap of metal and marine life was part of the Pendleton, he said. "It's like unmistakable," he said.

The ride back after that first dive was "quite a thrill," he said.

While the T-2 tankers are not unique or extraordinarily old, the historic rescue connected to the Pendleton makes the find exciting, Carey said.

"As soon as we got under water, within minutes I (thought), 'God, this looks awful familiar,'" said Carey's fellow diver, Don Ferris, 52, an East Sandwich resident and the author of several books on shipwrecks, including an anthology of wrecks off the Cape.

The steel girders were the same as those on the stern section of the Pendleton, located more than five miles to the north of where the bow section was found, Ferris said. The rows of girders supported the ship's deck, he said, and they are now exposed because this section has been flipped upside down.

Ferris speculates that when salvagers towed the bow away, a section caught on the bottom. The tug operator probably increased power to pull it loose, and ripped a section off close to the original break, Ferris said.

There is probably more of the bow than what is visible, buried beneath the sand, he said.

"It does have a lot of life and growth on it," Ferris said, adding that, surprisingly, there isn't any indication that a dragger net or fishing lines had tangled in the wreck. The currents around the wreck are strong, but visibility is good at 25 to 50 feet, Ferris said.

"There are no dangers other than the fast current and a little bit of sharp metal," he said.

The sands and silt beneath the shallow seas in the area where the Pendleton sank are constantly shifting because of wind-wave energies, Theresa Barbo, co-author of "The Pendleton Disaster Off Cape Cod: the Greatest Small Boat Rescue in Coast Guard History," wrote in an email to the Times.

It's possible Carey and Ferris found wreckage from the ship even as the 60th anniversary of its sinking approaches, Barbo wrote.

Although the tanker itself may not have a big historical significance, it is still a grave site and the rescue associated with it adds value, said Victor Mastone, director of the state's Board of Underwater Archeological Resources.

Even if the bow section is in state waters — Ferris believes it isn't — commonwealth officials would probably consider it to be a recreational site, like the stern, Mastone said.

The find also may be important for anyone interested in engineering questions and in what caused the Pendleton to break in half, he said.

The Pendleton's age makes it eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, but it is unlikely to ever be listed, Mastone said.

"Getting some press out there on the wrecks is always nice to us," Mastone said. "People are just intrigued by shipwrecks."