Video interview: Shipwreck hunter David Mearns, OBE

Oceanographer David Mearns, an American scientist who has lived and worked in Great Britain since the mid 1990s, is the world’s most successful shipwreck hunter. His company, Blue Water Recoveries Ltd., specializes in deep ocean search operations.

He received a Master’s in Marine Geology from the University of South Florida College of Marine Science in 1986, and spent much of the subsequent decade surveying and mapping the topographies and geological composition of the ocean floor.

Once he took an interest in locating shipwrecks, he says in this video interview, he never looked back.

USF named Mearns a Distinguished Alumni in 2011; eight years later he received the university’s Global Leadership Award. While he was in St. Petersburg for that ceremony, St. Pete Catalyst Publisher Joe Hamilton brought Mearns into the studio for a SPX podcast.

Mearns has discovered the location of more than two dozen historic shipwrecks around the globe, from the circa 1500 Portuguese trade ship Esmeralda (in the Gulf of Oman) to the Quest, explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s research vessel that outlived her master by nearly half a century, sinking amid pack ice in 1962 off the coast of Canada.

These are treacherous operations, requiring skill, the latest technology – and a great deal of patience. Blue Water Recoveries holds a Guinness World Record for the deepest shipwreck ever found, the German blockade runner Rio Grande (at a depth 5,762 meters).

Earlier this month, Prince William awarded Mearns the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the Location and Recovery of Historic Shipwrecks.

England loves David Mearns because he found the location of HMS Hood, the Royal Navy battle cruiser sunk by the predatory Nazi battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic in 1941. Only three sailors survived the sinking of the Hood; 1,415 died. It was the country’s most catastrophic naval loss during World War II. Mearns and his team located Hood in 2001; the British government allowed him to return to the site (officially designated a war grave) in 2012 to retrieve the ship’s bell,

Australia awarded him its prestigious Honorary Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) after he discovered the wreck of the World War II cruiser HMAS Sydney in deep water off the western Australian coast. It had been destroyed by the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, which also sank.

For many years, the precise locations of the two wrecks was unknown, resulting in a tremendous national mystery; Mearns found them in 2008.

The Catalyst conducted this video interview with Mearns, from his home in West Sussex, Feb. 20, 2025.