[Diver1111]

As with the search for Fred Surrette, F&G and other authorities have their work cut out for them. That’s the hand they’ve been dealt. It’s not as though they have any choice in the matter. The logistics of this work can be tough to say the least, depending on what you’re looking for, where, and when. The size of the area in this case is very very big. I can’t imagine any other equipment doing a better job than what they’ve been using working with the CT State Police (unless of course you’re JFK, Jr. and your uncle can call in the Navy with their gear, navy divers, and military vessels like the USS Grapple and an unlimited budget looking for pieces of a plane and send taxpayers the tab-which he did).

Bodies are as hard as it gets to find with SSS if for no other reason, size. Finding pipelines, underwater phone cables, ships, planes, large anchors and of course vessels among other pretty identifiable targets is easy compared to this task. To put this into perspective, I was watching TV some about 6 months ago when a professional search team running hardcore SSS had a bear of a time locating a 900 foot vessel in deep water. They had the approximate area, scanned both left & right simultaneously to perhaps ½ mile each way, and the captain was quoted as saying something to the effect of...”you’d think we could hit this thing easily enough-it’s 900 feet long-but no.” They found it only after going back over a tiny area they missed when they were “mowing the lawn”.

I’ve looked at the depths around Welch and they vary a lot, posing the same problems that the waters of East Rattlesnake posed. This is just the nature of the entire lakes region if not all of New England. And I have no idea what the bottom is like in the search area. Keep in mind the towfish has to stay at whatever depth the operator deems appropriate off the bottom. The altitude used off Rattlesnake was 20-30 feet in what was usually 130 feet of water. Slamming it into rocks or other objects is always a risk. Our tow line had a 2 ton tensile strength for this reason even though the fish only weighed about 60 lbs..

E. Rattlesnake was a nightmare of rock, mud, silt, cracks, crevices, house-size boulders, and trees-some sticking out horizontally from the shore-great way to tangle a towfish. There was little uniformity, making the unexpected, routine. As with Fred Surrette, if the object is well into a crack or crevice, it will likely never appear on SSS, ever. Divers may be the only solution-but where do you dive?

I’ve experimented with my own SSS unit, capturing the images below of dive buddies last August in the CT River down in Gill, MA under the French King Bridge. The bottom was clean washed rock and gravel-no weeds, grass, mud-nothing-which actually isn’t all that good for a background. Take a good look at the images and find the diver. It’s the horizontal shadow in both images. Now OF COURSE ¼” wetsuits will absorb a sonar wave big-time, but nonetheless my dive buddy was only in about 15 feet of water and well within the 50 foot scan range at 455kHz I was set to-close by. And yet she was nearly invisible. Bodies can pose similar problems of their own. I’m told the Brits have subs covered in rubber for just this reason.

I wish the searchers the best and thought my input my clarify some of the challenges they face.