DNREC Sinks Ex-Army-Navy Ship Shearwater as Boon to Delaware’s Acclaimed Reef System

By Justin Stakes

ATLANTIC OCEAN 38 deg. 31.200′ N Latitude and 074 deg. 30.800’W Longitude

Townsend, DE -(AmmoLand.com)- In the collegial spirit of a great rivalry taking place tomorrow, Dec.12, on a football field in Philadelphia, Delaware and DNREC’s Division of Fish & Wildlife today sank the former Army and Navy ship Shearwater onto the Del-Jersey-Land Reef as the latest fish-attracting habitat and underwater enhancement to Delaware’s acclaimed artificial reef system.

Shearwater – commissioned in 1944 as a coastal freighter for the Army and later converted to a Navy survey support ship – went down in 120 feet of water about one-half nautical mile from the centerpiece of the Del-Jersey-Land Reef, the 568-foot ex-destroyer USS Arthur W. Radford. Shearwater, one-third Radford’s length but with a height from keel of 38 feet, ended its working life in 2012 as a menhaden boat out of Reedville, Va., where it was last converted in the early 1970s to stay afloat.

Shearwater was sunk at approximate coordinates of 38 deg. 31.200′ N Latitude and 074 deg. 30.800’W Longitude, in the square-mile area comprising the Del-Jersey-Land Reef, approximately 26 nautical miles southeast of …Read the Rest

Source:: AmmoLand