CT Divers Find Historic Submarine At The Bottom Of Long Island Sound

OLD SAYBROOK, CT — Connecticut divers exploring the Long Island Sound on Sunday discovered a piece of history when they uncovered the wreckage of an experimental submarine built in 1907.

Long on a mission to find Defender, a 92-foot-long boat, Coventry commercial diver Richard Simon spent months going over government documents and known sonar and underwater mapping surveys of the bottom of the sound.

“A submarine has a very distinct shape,” Simon told The Associated Press. “It needs to be 100 feet long and 13 feet in diameter. So I made a list of everything that was that long and there was one target on that list.”

Simon then assembled a group of top wreck divers to determine if the Defender was in the location he had identified. On Sunday, the team discovered the Defender lying on the bottom, more than 150 feet beneath the water’s surface, off the coast of Old Saybrook.

“It was legitimately hiding in plain sight,” Simon said. “It’s on the charts. It’s known about in Long Island Sound, just no one knew what it was.” He added that the feeling when he and his team discovered the Defender was one of "pure joy."

Simon said he didn’t want to give the exact depth because that could give away the submarine's location.

The Defender was a submarine designed and built by Simon Lake for military and commercial use, according to the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives.

The submarine, originally named the Lake, was built by millionaire Simon Lake and his Bridgeport-based Lake Torpedo Boat Company in hopes of winning a competition for a U.S. Navy contract, according to a summary written by retired U.S. Nacy official David Johnston on NavSource Online, a website dedicated to preserving naval history.

It was an experimental vessel, with wheels to move along the sea bottom and a door that allowed divers to be released underwater, Simon said.

When the Lake lost the competition in nearly every category, Simon Lake rebuilt the boat as an underwater salvage vessel in an attempt to prompt the Navy to buy it for a different purpose, according to Johnston. This is when the Lake was renamed Defender.

The Navy never showed interest despite multiple attempts by Lake to have the boat fitted and used for submarine salvage work, Johnston wrote. Some goals that turned out to be Lake's pipe dreams were for the Defender to salvage gold from a sunken British frigate. Nonetheless, Defender was a well-known submarine and was even visited by aviator Amelia Earhart in 1929, Simon said.

The boat lingered on a dock in New London, sinking alongside several times, until finally abandoned on a mud flat near Old Saybrook, Johnston wrote. It was finally “scuttled” by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1946 and its location was unknown until Sunday's discovery.

Simon said he has already contacted the Navy to see if it would be interested in helping preserve the wreckage.

The ship has some protections under what is known as the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, a 1988 law that would allow it to be treated as an archaeological or historical site instead of a commercial property to be salvaged, according to Simon.

He said he hasn't figured out a way to monetize his find but that it wasn't his goal for seeking it in the first place.

"As a wreck diver, I can go visit history; I can touch it; I can experience it,” Simon said. “It’s just a different connection to history, to the past that we don’t have in any other activity.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.