Wednesday, April 13, 2005


Ghost of the abyss comes alive for Alberta shipwreck explorer


The Edmonton Journal
By Larry Johnsrude
April 11, 2005

Rob Rondeau, a marine archeologist from Alberta,
holds a gun his diving team recovered from the German
warship Oldenberg, which was sunk in 1945.
CREDIT: Rick Macwilliam, the Journal

Dive team hopes German warship will lead to Canadian vessel carrying dinosaur fossils.
EDMONTON -- As he floated above the submerged hull of the German warship sitting on the bottom of a Norwegian fiord, underwater explorer Rob Rondeau was struck by its sense of history.

Through the frigid crystal-clear water, he could easily see cargo winches, portholes and the forecastle deck that had once held guns blazing on that fateful morning in April 1945, when an Allied air attack sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Strewn throughout the officers' mess were china plates and cutlery from the last meal on board. Obviously, the fearsome Oldenberg had been abandoned quickly.

"It is still a mystery ship," said Rondeau, a professional diver and marine archeologist from the east Alberta town of Hardisty.

Rondeau led a team of four Canadian and Norwegian divers on a four-day underwater exploration of the Oldenberg early in March. The team is producing a 12-minute film on the expedition to premiere this month at a symposium on shipwrecks at the Vancouver Maritime Museum. Rondeau is also working on a longer film production with Alliance Atlantis, owners of The Discovery Channel.

The vessel, sitting on its starboard side on a coastal shelf of the Songe Fiord beneath 20 to 70 metres of water, was the most successful German ship of the First and Second World Wars. It captured or sank more than 50 ships, including a Canadian merchant ship containing a collection of rare dinosaur fossils from the badlands near Brooks.

The March weather was calm but cold off the Norwegian coast when the dive took place. Although the water temperature was 3 C, it felt much colder.

"Typically, each dive lasted an hour and a half," Rondeau said. "It's so cold that when you get out of the water, you're spent."

The ship's steep angle was disorienting. Swimming over the middle of the cargo deck, the divers made it as far as the bridge, 50 metres underwater. The large guns on the forward deck have been removed, although the cannons on the stern, deeper than the team ventured, are believed to be intact.

"You can still clearly make out some glass windows and several gauges," said Rondeau. "There is very little corrosion and most of the wood is still intact, including the ship's deck. It's the best-preserved Second World War wreck that I've seen."

The wreck has been explored by a number of amateur divers over the last decade, but Rondeau's was the first professional team.

The Oldenburg met its end on April 7, 1945. The ship was among several German warships hiding in a secluded part of Norway when a British scout plane spotted it off the rocky coast near the village of Vadheim. Within hours, a squadron of Bristol Beaufighters swooped in and sent the Oldenberg and the other German ships to the bottom of the fiord. One crew member died and the rest escaped in lifeboats.

The ship's contents remains a mystery. Although official records list the Oldenberg's cargo as canned fish and motorcycles, residents of Vadheim have long suspected it was carrying uranium destined for Germany's nuclear weapons program.

While the rest of the team explored the sunken ship last month, Darren Tanke of Drumheller interviewed five witnesses of the battle, now in their 70s and 80s. "They were very vivid in their description of the sounds of the engines and the gunfire echoing off the valley walls."

Tanke's interest goes beyond the Oldenberg. He is hoping their film will raise interest in a far more ambitious project -- an exploration of the Canadian merchant ship, the SS Mount Temple. It was sunk by the Oldenberg (then called the SS Moewe) while carrying dinosaur fossils to London from Canada during the First World War.

That ship and its 75-million-year-old cargo lie beneath 4,375 metres of water -- deeper than the legendary Titanic -- in a remote part of the Atlantic Ocean.

Tanke, a technologist at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, is heading the project to explore the Mount Temple and to recover the lost fossils. The effort would cost millions of dollars.

It is a labour of love rather than a profit-making venture. The fossils aren't valuable enough to justify the expense but he's hoping a film on their recovery would raise enough money to pay for the expedition.


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