During my research in Australia, I kept a working copy of a chart I would update with various clues and positions, and sometimes use to help the people I was interviewing to visualize where everything was located. I still had the mysterious ‘official position’ marked on this chart, although no one knew for sure where it came from. Because this position (27° 17’ south, 154° 05’ east) was referenced on a number of later Japanese documents, the general belief was that it came from the attacking submarine I-177. I would have been happy if this was true, but eventually I was able to prove that it originated from an official based on shore in Brisbane three days after the attack. Since the position didn’t come from either the Centaur or I-177, I decided it could be discounted. This wasn’t the first time I’d found that an ‘official position’ was a fabrication, but it was surprising in this instance that it had somehow achieved this status in both Australia and Japan.
Meanwhile I was still struggling with the important question of whether Gordon Rippon was able to see the Point Lookout light from the distances needed for his fix at 3.30 a.m. Through the magic of the Internet I created an email group that included John Foley, Jack Duvoisin, Ian Jempson and Kevin Slade — a senior manager at the Australian Hydrographic Office who was also helping me – that allowed us to exchange information and ideas about this issue. In view of Jack’s information that the maximum range for Point Lookout was in the order of seventeen nautical miles, we were stuck with the real possibility that Rippon never saw this light and mistakenly took his position from the more powerful Cape Moreton light instead. John thought we could get better information about the maximum range in 1943 from the AMSA archives, so he arranged for a friend to make a copy of their historical file on the Point Lookout light and send it to him. The file arrived while John was piloting a ship on the Torres Strait route, so I got first crack at reading through the two-inch thick stack of papers.
The AMSA file was essentially a record of every piece of official correspondence about Point Lookout dating back to the first requests for a light in 1927 because overseas shipmasters had complained about the absence of one along this stretch of coastline. It contained every piece of technical data about the tower and light, including the all-important Notices to Mariners detailing that the white light would flash three times every fifteen seconds. The visibility of the light was given as 22 miles. After the light was actually established on 9 February 1932, a lighthouse tender ship, the SS Cape York, was sent out to check its visibility the very next week. Cape York’s master, AS Stumbles, duly reported ‘that the visibility of the Point Lookout light was checked and found to be 23.8 miles at 30 feet high water’. The file contained letters from two other masters who reported seeing the light from distances of 18–20 miles, with the latter commenting, ‘there was a fresh NE blowing at the time but I had no difficulty in picking it up 20 miles off yet the weather was not too clear’. The fact that masters on ships smaller than Centaur could see the light from these distances proved that 17 nautical miles wasn’t the maximum, and that Rippon’s sighting from 23 miles was entirely possible.
With my confidence in Rippon restored, and the pessimism surrounding the visibility of the Point Lookout light lifted, I took a second look at the statements survivors had made about seeing lights on the two nights they were drifting on the rafts. Of those who were interviewed and asked about what lights they saw, fifteen replied that they did indeed see the lighthouse lights on at least one of the nights, and several saw the lights on both nights. Taking into account their low elevation, it was still geographically possible for the survivors to have seen the Point Lookout and Cape Moreton lights at 19 and 24 nautical miles respectively. Visibility would have had to be exceptional, although Rippon’s sighting indicates it probably was. Of the survivors who saw the lights, two were merchant seamen whose statements I felt could be trusted.
Captain Richard Salt was a senior-ranked Torres Strait pilot (like John Foley), who had been coaxed out of retirement to take Centaur on one last trip. Despite burns to his hands and face, he got away from the sinking ship and wound up on survival island, where he optimistically predicted that they would be picked up by a passing ship. Having sailed up and down this coastline for nearly fifty years, he knew the lights, and the distances at which they could be seen, better than anyone. At 3 a.m. on the 15th, their second night adrift, Salt could see the glare of Cape Moreton light, but not the light itself. He explained in his interview that this meant they were over 27 miles from land, as he knew that Cape Moreton was a 27-mile light. He also added the very useful detail that ‘I formed the opinion we were abreast of the light.’
At last I could see the disparate clues beginning to fall into place. Assuming that Rippon’s position was approximately correct, and that a clockwise eddy did take the survivors on a looping course to where they were rescued by Mugford, then in the early hours of the 15th they would have been roughly abeam of Cape Moreton light as Captain Salt believed. Survivor William McIntosh’s testimony added another significant piece to the puzzle, as he distinctly saw both lights on the night of the 14th after the ship sank: ‘Taken fore and aft, I was sitting on the starboard side of the raft. I could see Cape Moreton 25-degrees north and Point Lookout about 25-degrees south.’ I drew McIntosh’s bearings to the two lights and was amazed to see that the intersection point was only three nautical miles north of Rippon’s sinking position, and virtually in line with the Elders’ sighting of the flash from Bald Knob Farm.
The three clues formed an incredibly tight cluster that was almost too good to be true given the extremes at which the observations were taken. It was the first time in all my shipwreck searches where every clue was based on the sighting of a distant light on the horizon. However, the fact that so many reliable witnesses reported seeing these lights did tend to indicate that the visibility was indeed exceptional. There was only one more sighting I needed to investigate, which was potentially the most promising of the lot because it was made by military personnel in an excellent position to have seen the aftermath of the attack. Only three men were involved, however, and my worry was whether any of them were still alive and healthy enough to speak to me.
The sighting had been made by army personnel attached to the ‘O’ Australian Heavy Battery, whose job was to prepare emplacements for establishing Rous Battery and a tented campsite on the ocean-facing coast of Moreton Island. Although the guns and searchlights hadn’t yet arrived, they did have protective picquets posted at the battery position, which had a clear line of sight out to sea where Centaur was steaming up the coast. At the exact moment 1–177 was lining up to fire on Centaur, Lieutenant Russ Ward and Sergeant Dermot Reilly were doing the rounds of the picquets. They were chatting to the picquet, Sapper Rudi Glass, when Centaur exploded in a huge fireball that was seen by all three men. Lieutenant Ward ran up to the camp and woke his commanding officer, Major R. K. Fullford, who initially discounted the sighting but on Ward’s insistence allowed him to make a telephone report of what he had seen. I was given an excellent written account of the story by Fullford’s widow, but what I really wanted was to speak to one of the three men to verify the details, with the direction in which they saw the explosion most important.
I had no idea of the whereabouts of Ward, Reilly or Glass, but I did remember that shortly after I’d won the contract, Jan Thomas from the Centaur Association had forwarded an email to me from Fred Rubie, who was at Rous Battery in May 1943 and was willing to talk to me about what he knew. I met Fred at his home in Tocumwal, NSW, where he was able to confirm the basic details in Fullford’s account. Unfortunately he wasn’t able to add any new information about the incident, which was slightly disappointing, but just before leaving I asked if he had kept in touch with anyone he’d served with at Rous Battery. When he told me that he was still in contact with Russ Ward, I couldn’t believe my luck.
I got straight on the phone to Ward and asked if we could meet. I needed to rearrange my travel schedule, but I was happy to fly ba
ck to Brisbane and make the four-hour drive down to his home in Yamba, Queensland, as long he could give me an hour or so of his time. I had grown so used to conducting my research in libraries and archives, it was exciting to be meeting people who were part of history as it was being made. Like so many others with a connection to Centaur, he readily agreed to tell me everything he remembered about 14 May 1943.
Three days later, I was sitting with eighty-nine-year old Russ and his wife Nancy in the lounge of their bungalow, listening to a story that was as vivid and clear in his mind as if it had happened the day before:
I was the gun position officer and was recently promoted to lieutenant. I turned twenty-three two days before. I was in charge of two sergeants who were responsible for the individual guns. At 3.30 Reilly the sergeant and I went to inspect the sentries, which normally took us about an hour. We had finished with the gun positions and were heading over to the no. 1 searchlight emplacement where Rudi Glass was the sentry. Glass was facing seaward, and I was facing landward. All of a sudden Glass shouted, ‘Shit, what’s that.’ I turned around and saw the explosion, which was a glare on the horizon, and then it died down. About two seconds later we heard this monstrous explosion. I knew something was drastically wrong so I ran up to the camp to wake Major Fullford who told me to phone in the report using the light field cable.
Russ’s memory for detail was excellent. It was as if the experience had been permanently seared into his mind by the flash of that explosion sixty-six years ago. However, for him to be truly helpful to the search, I needed to know in fairly precise terms the direction in which it had happened. Russ didn’t disappoint. He told me they were standing on a north-to-south path and the explosion was perpendicular to the path, which would make the direction approximately due east. When I pressed him whether he was sure, he added that it was possibly slightly north of east, but certainly not north of Cape Moreton. He estimated that the range in error was plus or minus 10°. When I plotted a line due east of Rous Battery, I was beyond delighted to see that it was barely one nautical mile away from Rippon’s sinking position.
From the very beginning of my research, the Rous Battery sighting had had the potential to be one of the most important clues to the location of the wreck. These men were physically the closest of anyone to the incident, and what they had witnessed became part of the documented history of the Centaur story. There was always the small chance, however, that their story was the result of a conflated memory. Many otherwise honest people along this coastline were utterly convinced they themselves had seen something that in fact was physically impossible for them to have seen. Russ Ward was not one of these people. He was in the right place at the right time and immediately reported what he saw to a higher authority. I had needed to meet him to be 100 per cent certain of this. That was what I had been hired to do: to be absolutely meticulous in verifying every possible clue. But now that I had spoken to Russ, I had no doubts about the importance of his clue and where it told me we should begin searching for Centaur’s wreck.
To find a shipwreck on the first line of searching, you have to be either extraordinarily lucky or have the benefit of a fairly accurate sinking position.
Blue Water Recoveries once had an amazing spell where we found four deep-water wrecks on the trot, all on the first line. In those searches we obviously started with very good positions, but a fair amount of analysis and skill was also involved in picking the correct line out of the several we had to choose from. I doubt such a run of success with historic wrecks will ever be repeated. There was another time when I once found a wreck in twelve minutes. But as that was a small speedboat that had sunk in Baltimore’s outer harbour in less than twenty-five feet of water, it can’t be compared against Centaur and is only worth mentioning in the context of the absolute minimum time it can take to find a wreck by sonar when you know where the wreck is but can’t see it.
Despite the odds against it, and the fact that I almost never contemplate finding a wreck so quickly, I actually thought with Centaur there was a real chance we could find it on the very first line given that all the clues indicated that Rippon’s position was pretty much spot-on. While I kept such thoughts to myself so as not to raise expectations beyond what was reasonable, my plan for the search was designed to give us exactly this chance. In an overall search box of 19 by 21 nautical miles (399 square nautical miles) covering every worst-case scenario in the unlikely event that Rippon was wrong, I outlined a high-probability circle in red centred on a small dot that represented Rippon’s position. In fact, I had plotted two dots. One was based on the position reported by the USS Mugford (‘070° true from Pt. Lookout 24 miles’), which undoubtedly came from what Rippon had told Mugford’s captain, even though the position was probably worked out by the ship’s navigator. I had calculated the second position (27° 16.6’ south, 153° 58.3’ east) as a dead reckoning from Rippon’s 3.30 a.m. position based on Centaur’s speed (twelve knots) and course (due north) up until the time she was sunk. As the two dots were about a mile apart, I decided to run the first trackline right between them, knowing that both positions could be covered at the same time.
This was track-line no. 8 (the first of fifteen) in the centre of my search box, which I oriented 340°/160° to make towing the side-scan sonar over the rugged seabed as safe as possible. Williamson & Associates had again been chosen as the search contractor, and at 7.37 a.m. on 14 December 2009, their ageing but still very capable SM-30 sonar towfish entered the search box to officially start the Phase 1 wide-swath search for Centaur’s 94-metre hull amongst the mountainous terrain. It didn’t take long to see just how technically difficult the search was going to be. Three steep submarine canyons, with walls as high as 600 metres, were carved into the section of continental margin we were searching. Within each of the fan canyons, narrower finger-like gullies descended down the slope faces. By the end of that first track-line I estimated that roughly 30 per cent of the seabed was virtually impossible to search, either because it was too steep or because acoustic shadows formed behind rocky ridges could not be insonified.
It was a little discouraging that our chances of finding the wreck were so seriously reduced because of the rough seabed. Nevertheless, I was grateful that the weather was ideal for towing operations, that the SM-30 sonar was working well, and that the other major operational risk I had feared would cause us problems failed to materialize. We owed our good fortune in this instance to one of those supposedly rare clockwisespinning cold-core eddies that reduced the EAC from its customary two knots down to less than half a knot. Because David Griffin had advised that the eddy should persist for a further three days, I decided to keep searching the track-lines in order of priority before investigating any sonar targets.
The combination of depth and relatively short track-lines meant the pace of the search was pretty rapid. Depending on whether we were towing with the current or against it, the track-lines were taking between 5½ and 9½ hours to run, with most turns taking just a couple of hours. With so much geology to sift through, it was impossible for Williamson’s sonar analyst to keep up the pace. I had my own image-processing system ready to monitor the images in real-time, but I was being constantly dragged away to deal with media issues. I wasn’t supposed to be the main government spokesman for the search, but when the local Courier Mail newspaper began unfairly criticizing Anna Bligh for a website that was created to keep the public informed, I was asked to take on this role. So in addition to directing the search, I was writing a daily search diary for the website and doing interviews with a TV news reporter who came out by helicopter and hovered above us while a cameraman uplinked the video and my voice to the helicopter.
By day four of the search we had completed seven of the fifteen tracklines, and covered roughly 60 per cent of the search box at least once. As my aim was to cover all areas of the box a minimum of 200 per cent, we had effectively searched the entire high-probability area twice, even though we were less than halfway through the
Phase 1 plan. By this time the influence of the cold-core eddy was diminishing and the EAC was rapidly increasing in strength, as David Griffin had predicted. In the space of less than twenty-four hours, the current speed had risen from two knots to four knots: the EAC was back with a vengeance. The only way the marine crew of our support vessel, the Seahorse Spirit, could stay on track in such conditions was to engage both her powerful bow and stern tunnel thrusters and ‘crab’ down the lines at an angle of forty-five degrees. I doubt anyone trying to sleep in the ship’s lower decks that evening got any rest at all.
Mike Kelly, Williamson’s sonar analyst, had carefully picked out six targets that matched the characteristics for Centaur I had given him. Using the CSIRO bathymetric data as a backdrop, he was able to overlay the side-scan sonar imagery on top, allowing the targets to be viewed in a three-dimensional perspective. This helped us assess whether they were geology or man-made. However, as none of the targets could be classified as a wreck at this point, I decided to stop the wide-swath search in order to collect higher-resolution imagery on each of the six. The spacing of the targets was such that we could image them all on one multi-leg track-line, but unfortunately we were at the wrong end of the search box to achieve this because of the strong southerly-flowing EAC. We needed to start back up at the northern end of the box, which meant running one more wide-swath track-line to get the SM-30 towfish in position. It was at the end of this track-line (no. 13), as the Williamson team were hauling in tow cable in preparation for the upcoming turn, that disaster struck.
The Shipwreck Hunter Page 34