David Mearns

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David Mearns, born circa 1958, is a United States-born marine scientist and deep water search and recovery expert, long resident in the United Kingdom. He is famous for locating the wrecks of ships lost in World War II, including the British battleship HMS Hood in 2001, and both the Australian cruiser HMAS Sydney and the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran, in 2008.

Mearns and his company, Blue Water Recoveries Limited, are in Guinness World Records for the deepest shipwreck ever found, the German World War II blockade runner Rio Grande, which was located at a depth of 5,762 metres (18,900 ft).

He has also found:

Lucona, sunk in 1977 by a bomb planted by Udo Proksch, as part of an insurance fraud
Derbyshire, an ore-bulk-oil carrier which disappeared in 1980
Esmeralda, a Portuguese nau from the fleet of Vasco da Gama, which was lost in 1503

Mearns also led the 2001 expedition to the the ship that sank Hood, the German battleship Bismarck, which had been found by Robert Ballard and his team in 1989.

Prior to finding HMAS Sydney, Mearns said that it was, in some ways, "bigger than the Titanic" because of what it meant to Australia. "Nothing comes close to the Sydney."^[1]

Blue Water Recoveries is based in Midhurst, West Sussex, England and Mearns lives nearby.

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