Gentlemen,

It all sounds very easy to locate a wreck at a supposed "known' location of the sinking, but in this case, the U-550 was nowhere near the recorded locations of her loss. As many ships had been in the location of the forming convoy CU-21 approximately 150 miles East of Ambrose Light (approximately 75 miles Southeast of Nantucket). the torpedo attack on the SS Pan Pannsylvania and subsequent attack and sinking of U-550 should have been accurately recorded. Locations between Lat.40-07 North/Long. 69-24.30 West and Lat.40-09 North/Long. 69-44 West had been positions listed in the deck logs of the USS Joyce (DE-317) and USS Gandy (DE-764), among others. Dozens of searches over the past 40+ years employing magnetometers and side-scan sonar had failed to produce the wreck of the U-550. Dozens of known and previously unidentified wrecks were located, and hundreds of square miles of ocean bottom had been scoured, but U-550 had always eluded detection. This latest group included one of New England's top shipwreck researchers and technical wreck divers, Eric Tekekjian*, and one of the world's leading side-scan sonar experts, Gary Kozak (formerly with Klein Associates), a student of Marty Klein, who helped to develop the technology with "Doc" Edgerton. Those men are the top in their respective fields, and employ only the latest, state of the art technology. To the uninformed it all sounds like finding the wreck of the U-550 should have been a simple, straight forward task...but it was not. Those men should be commended for their efforts, as they expended a lot of money and many years of effort to finally locate the long missing wreck of the U-550.

* Note: Eric Tekekjian had located and dove on the wreck of the Nantucket Lightship as well as the 1916 victims of the U-53 (KL Hans Rose), all also located in the area of Nantucket Shoal.

Regards,

Paul