A Scanlon, Minn., man’s search for a historic sunken U-boat turned up empty last week.
Jerry Eliason, 61, and his crew spent five days using side-scan sonar in an effort to locate the German U-656 off the Atlantic Coast of Newfoundland. The U-boat was the first one sunk by U.S. bombers in World War II.
“The magnetic anomaly we headed to Newfoundland to investigate turned out to be a surface ship that just happened to be tantalizingly close to where U-656 was attacked on March 1, 1942,” Eliason wrote as a recap of his latest adventure. “We came up empty. We likely won’t be going back until we can get the results of a custom aerial magnetic survey.”
Such a survey would cost roughly $60,000, he said.
Eliason and his band of shipwreck enthusiasts have discovered 16 sunken vessels throughout their careers, many in Lake Superior.
