The Navy's deep sea robot found the sunken Ehime Maru late Friday, but no bodies of the nine crewmen and students missing since their boat was struck by a nuclear submarine Feb. 9 have been detected, a Navy spokesman said this morning.
The Navy, operating a remote-controlled underwater vehicle, the Super Scorpio II, found the Japanese training vessel at 11:20 last night. The sunken ship was sitting nearly upright at a depth of 2,033 feet.
The site — located at latitude 21 - 04.95N and longitude 157 - 49.58W — is about 1,000 yards from the collision site reported by the submarine USS Greeneville.
"Our sonor detected something at 11:25 p.m., and the video cameras verified that it was the ship at 11:29 p.m. by reading the stern plate of the vessel," said Jon Yoshishige, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
While no bodies have been found as of this morning, Yoshishige noted that the Super Scorpio II is too large to enter the wreckage. Based on witness reports from the Ehime Maru crewman, some of the missing were last seen on the lower decks of the ship.
The unmanned sub is equipped with sonar and two video cameras, but has limited recovery capability. A second deep-sea submersible, the Deep Drone, was scheduled to head for the scene at noon aboard the Navy salvage ship the USS Salvor to assist in the search.
The Navy support ship C Commando lowered the Super Scorpio II into the waters nine miles south of Diamond Head Friday afternoon after two days of adverse sea conditions prevented its launch.
The families of those missing have asked the Navy and Coast Guard to continue searching for the nine men and boys although chances of their survival after a week at sea are slim.
Four high school students, two teachers and three crewmen from the commercial fishing training vessel remain missing. Twenty-six others were rescued after the collision.
