Michigan Diving Center

10/11/2026

Dive into a sunken carrier turned thriving marine wonderland.

10/10/2026

The Navy Confirmed Her Wreck Exactly 82 Years After 83 Men Vanished

On June 1, 2026, the Naval History and Heritage Command confirmed that a submarine wreck lying about 300 feet down off Matsuwa Island, in the Kuril chain, is USS Herring, exactly 82 years after she was lost. The wreck was first located in 2017 by a joint Russian Geographic Society and Russian military expedition, which suspected her identity from her location and appearance. A 2022 return expedition documented the site and placed a commemorative plaque for her crew. The island has been under Russian control since August 1945, so the confirmation depended on data collected by Russian teams. That data was analyzed by two American volunteer researchers and one Japanese researcher before the Navy's archaeologists confirmed it. The wreck sits upright on her keel, and the Navy says she maintains a high degree of integrity. Her bow shows evidence of grounding and her conning tower shows hit damage, matching the historical record.

Herring left Midway on May 21, 1944, under Commander David Zabriskie Jr., bound for the Kurils. Early on June 1, she is credited with sinking two Japanese merchant ships anchored at Matsuwa. Then she ran aground. Japanese shore batteries spotted her and scored two direct hits on her conning tower as she backed away into the fog. She was never heard from again. When she failed to report to Midway on July 13, she was presumed lost with all 83 men aboard, a rare case of an American submarine sunk by coastal artillery. In her first seven patrols alone she had sunk nine ships totaling 45,200 tons. In 2005, a memorial sign to her crew and all lost submarines was placed on the nearby shore.

For 82 years, her crew's families had a date but no place. Now they have both.

Photos by:Eternal Patrol/RGS

10/02/2026

A Volunteer Noticed Bubbles in 2019 — It Led to a $1.4 Million Discovery

In 2019, a volunteer aboard USS Cod noticed bubbles rising from one of her ballast tanks. The follow-up inspection found a rust hole in the hull that shouldn't have been there — the submarine hadn't been drydocked since 1963. In June 2021, Cod was towed 14 hours across Lake Erie from Cleveland to a private shipyard in Erie, Pennsylvania, the first time she'd been out of the water in 58 years. Inspectors found sections of her outer hull wasted away by corrosion and had to cut them out and weld in new steel. The bottom of the hull, by contrast, turned out to be in better shape than anyone expected. The full restoration came to 1.4 million dollars, funded partly by grants and partly through donations, including fresh protective marine coatings donated by Sherwin-Williams.

Cod was built in 1943 and completed seven war patrols in the Pacific, sinking over thirty-seven thousand tons of enemy shipping. She endured fierce depth-charge counterattacks and air strafing that left dents across her superstructure, yet remarkably she only suffered one crew fatality throughout her entire wartime service. She earned seven battle stars for her Pacific service. Today, she is widely revered as the only preserved WWII fleet submarine with no civilian access doors cut through her pressure hull. Climbing aboard still means descending the exact vertical ladders and watertight hatches her wartime sailors used.

A combat veteran that survived depth charges and aerial strikes was nearly undone by quiet freshwater corrosion — until someone noticed the bubbles.

Photo Credit: USS Cod Submarine Memorial

09/30/2026

West Michigan underwater preserve. Needs help to get two new bouys for two of the racks. You could come in to Michigan Diving Center and donate to help raise funds for the bouys. Sometime next year, there will be a drawing to the people that donated for a IST BC.

09/30/2026

Cleaning up the bouy off the shipwrecks these three guys do a great job taking care of this stuff

09/28/2026

She Was Launched Exactly One Year After Pearl Harbor — and Now Sits 500 Yards From the Ship She Was Built to Avenge

Eight days after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, the Portsmouth Navy Yard received orders to forge a new weapon of retribution. On December 7, 1942—one year to the day after 2,403 Americans died—workers launched her into the water. They called her the Pearl Harbor Avenger. Officially commissioned as USS Bowfin (SS-287), the 311-foot Balao-class submarine carried twenty-four torpedoes and a crew of eighty men.

On the night of November 26, 1943, Commander Walter Griffith drove her into a Japanese convoy during a blinding storm, throwing her engines into reverse to avoid a collision before opening fire. By morning, she had torpedoed five vessels in a single night. Across nine relentless war patrols, her crew claimed forty-four enemy ships destroyed, ranking among the deadliest American submarines of the entire Pacific War.

The enemy never caught her. She was decommissioned and eventually towed to the Hawaiian waters to become a legend. Today, she sits permanently moored at Pearl Harbor as a floating museum, resting exactly 500 yards from the sunken hull of the USS Arizona—the very battleship whose destruction ordered her into existence. The luxury is gone, replaced by narrow, claustrophobic corridors where visitors stand above the same harbor where 1,177 sailors still rest in the deep. Her active days are over. The Avenger has finally come to the sacred place she was meant to answer for, a silent steel sentinel guarding the ghosts of the American fleet.

Photos:
By jimmyweee - USS Bowfin (SS 287), CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26288683
By U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Johans Chavarro/Released - This image was released by the United States Navy with the ID 140819-N-IU636-577

09/17/2026