The water was dark and cold, but more than 100 feet down in Long Island Sound, the divers could see about 10 yards around them at the gravelly sea floor.
They connected a reel to the line that ran up to the surface and began swimming against the current, knowing they only had one shot at finding their prize before the window awarded by the tides closed again. The water pressing against the special dry suits they wore hovered at 44 degrees, cold enough that hypothermia was a concern.
They swam for about 25 feet, and then the profile of the sunken submarine, buried under the waves for nearly 80 years, emerged from the gloom.
“Bam, there it was,” recalled Steven Abbate, who dove off the coast of Old Saybrook, Connecticut to the wreck Sunday with co-diver Joe Mazraani.
The team, led by commercial diver Richard Simon located the Defender, a 92-foot-long submarine built by Simon Lake in 1907 at his Lake Torpedo Boat Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Lake, a millionaire who Simon said was inspired by Jules Verne’s “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” tried unsuccessfully to sell the experimental craft to the U.S. Navy, according to Simon.
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“The profile of the sub was absolutely amazing,” Abbate said in a phone interview Thursday, recalling the discovery.
However, there was little time for he and Mazraani to celebrate.
The pair of divers made their way up from…
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