Video of shipwreck near Point Arena yields ‘twisted garden of steel’

Orange rockfish swim over the shattered wreck of the Dorothy Wintermote off the Mendocino County coast, captured on video Saturday night and seen live by scientists aboard a research vessel and an online audience around the world.

A remotely operated vehicle spent about four hours cautiously circling the “twisted garden of steel,” as shipwreck hunter James Delgado described the remains of the 261-foot cargo freighter that sank after striking a rock south of Point Arena in September 1938.

“It was a little murky,” Delgado said of the limited underwater visibility during an interview by satellite phone Sunday aboard famed undersea explorer Robert Ballard’s high-tech research vessel Nautilus.

The Wintermote’s fate was documented by newspapers at the time, and the wreck’s location on the flat, muddy ocean bottom had been pinpointed in a sonar survey in 2007, but Saturday’s video gave the world the first direct view of the ill-fated vessel, said Delgado, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s director of maritime heritage.

White anemone, a flower-like marine animal related to corals and jellyfish, cling to the wreck in 260 feet of water in still images processed Sunday by Ballard’s Ocean Exploration Trust and the NOAA.

After confirming the Wintermote’s location in a 3-D sonar image taken by equipment built into the Nautilus’ hull, Ballard’s crew deployed the bright yellow remote vehicle Hercules about 8 p.m.

The vehicle came down by the Wintermote’s bow, which shattered on impact with the sea floor as it sank bow-first. A little more than half of the ship’s stern portion remained intact, Delgado said, affording Hercules’ camera a clear view of collapsed masts, a four-bladed steel propeller and the rudder, swung hard to the left.

Peering into the remains of the forward hold, the camera caught mud-covered cargo, including barrels, broken jars, dishes and sealed cans. The deckhouse, where the crew lived, was intact on the Wintermote’s stern, its interior pitch dark.

The vehicle made a 360-degree survey of the wreck, Delgado said.

The Wintermote was a “tramp freighter,” hauling basic goods and lumber along the North Coast, just as big rigs do on the highway today, he said.

“This is not a famous ship,” said Delgado, whose career includes exploration of the Titanic and the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor. It is, instead, an “everyday ship” manned by “everyday guys who had to go to work,” he said.

The Wintermote, with a crew of 29, was steaming from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon when it encountered fog and ran aground off Fish Rock, about ?10 miles south of Point Arena. The crew was rescued, and three days later the vessel sank under tow by a tugboat after heavy seas had pushed it off the rocks.

The Nautilus is conducting an 11-day survey of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, including the Sonoma and Mendocino coasts, and part of the Monterey Bay sanctuary.

As Delgado spoke Sunday, the Hercules was sending up color video as it traversed a ridge about 4,000 feet down in Arena Canyon, where deepwater coral grow a few miles from the Dorothy Wintermote.

Tonight, the Ballard expedition plans to survey the wreck of the USS Independence, a World War II aircraft carrier scuttled west of the Golden Gate five years after serving as a target during the U.S. atomic weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in 1946.

Video feed from Hercules, transmitted by fiber-optic cable, is shown live at www.nautiluslive.org. People from more than 20 countries posted messages during the dive on the Wintermote, Delgado said.