Wreck of USS Conestoga off Farallones Official

USS Conestoga (AT 54) | at San Diego, circa January 1921
(Naval Historical Center Photograph NH 71299)

Navy tugboat lost for a century found off California coast | The Tribune

With the Discovery of the USS Conestoga, Researchers Have Solved a Mystery That Was Nearly 100 Years Old | History | Smithsonian

NOAA discovered remains of the tugboat about 2,000 miles away from where it was originally presumed to have been lost, in California’s Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. The Conestoga first appeared in 2009 on a sonar survey that the agency was conducting to document historical shipwrecks in the San Francisco area. At the time, investigators weren’t even sure a wreck was there. Conducting dives in 2014 and 2015, investigators used video cameras mounted on remote-operated vehicles to examine the underwater site more closely. “We went back three times because it just kept calling to us,” says James Delgado, director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries’ Maritime Heritage Program. “There was something about it that spoke to mystery.”
Delgado and Robert Schwemmer, the office’s West Coast regional coordinator, first suspected that the ship might be the Conestoga in the fall of 2014 and confirmed its identity during their October 2015 expedition.

After 95 years, a Navy ship lost at sea with all hands is finally discovered - The Washington Post

Wednesday, 95 years after the USS Conestoga disappeared, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and the Navy announced that the wreck has been found a few miles from Southeast Farallon Island, just off the California coast.

The announcement came at a morning ceremony at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, attended by relatives of the lost sailors.

The wreck site, in NOAA’s Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, was imaged during a sonar survey in 2009, and examined by underwater robots in 2014 and 2015, said James P. Delgado, director of maritime heritage with the Office of the National Marine Sanctuaries.

After exhaustive research, which was complicated by the Navy’s assessment that the ship had sunk 2,000 miles away, the wreck was confirmed in October as the Conestoga.