East Hartford’s Shipwrecked Schooner.

Go a mile find a wreck ....

John Stanford, Al Langer, Mark Samek, and I organized a trip to East Hartford on November 8th, 2014 to image a schooner that had recently come to our attention in the news, Police officer hoping to solve mystery of sunken schooner.

After consulting the NOAA chart and Google Earth for the area the schooner was supposed to be located, we had a pretty good idea where we’d find her:

Chart 12378, Connecticut River, Hartford, GreatRiver Park Schooner  GE, Connecticut River, Hartford, GreatRiver Park Schooner

Meeting at the Great River Park boat launch we’d use John’s RIB as our scanning platform.

After leaving the boat launch, and before imaging the schooner, I wanted to “play” around a bit with the sonar system I was using. The system was an Edgetech 4125 that I was borrowing from a friend and my goal was to see if I could image the river bottom from bank to bank…..just at the beginning of our trek north I saw something interesting on the bottom that we’d need to go back and look at after our business at hand was complete:

Initial target, Connecticut River, Hartford, GreatRiver Park Schooner

After we finished imaging the river bottom from bank to bank we then focused our attention on imaging “The Schooner”. This proved a challenging task due to the shallowness of the site and required a number of hours to accomplish. Time sure does fly when you’re having fun ……..

Ultimately we got what we were looking for, a sonar image of the schooner on the bottom of the Connecticut River:

This is an image of just the schooner, north is at the top (click on the image for a full sized view):

 Schooner, 11-08-2014. 900kHz, 20141108164451, Ping 27099, 28029a

This image shows the schooner, the bulwarks on the shore (shoreline is on right), tree stumps/debris north
of the wreck, and a scour in the bottom below the wreck made by the rivers current”

North is at the top, (click on the image for a full sized view):

Schooner, 15, 11-08-2014. 900kHz, 20141108174414, Ping 145382, 145995, 146839

Mission accomplished!

Now that we’d completed our primary task we continued down river to look for the “target of interest” that I had seen earlier. It didn’t take long before we found what we were looking for ….. Just a third of a mile from the known schooner shipwreck.

50 meter range, 900 kHz, river flow from left (north) to right (south):

Target 1, 11-08-2014. 900kHz, 20141108180326, Ping 163434a

It looks to be a small 8’ x 30’ work barge of some sort.
One more item on the list to visually inspect someday, so much to do so little time ………..
15 meter range:

Target 1, 11-08-2014. 900kHz, 20141108180326, Ping 176505a

Here’s a short video of our fun on the river that day:

East Hartford’s Shipwrecked Schooner. from Mark Munro on Vimeo.

Comments on this post

  1. Excellent to the point presentation. One picture is worth a thousand words. Your equipment appears to be topnotch.