“It’s not about finding ships,” Tim Taylor said. “The importance of our work is to connect families and bring some type of closure and peace even generations later.”
Since she was a young girl, Helen Cashell Baldwin was haunted by the mystery of what happened to the doomed Navy submarine USS R-12.
But in 2011, a relative forwarded her a website claiming the missing submarine had been found. Ocean explorer Tim Taylor, who set up the site, wanted to get in touch with family members of the victims. Helen Cashell Baldwin and her siblings Muriel and Ralph toss roses in the ocean above the Navy submarine USS R-12.
The son of a Navy veteran who fought in World War II, Taylor has spent his life exploring the ocean’s uncharted waters. Technological breakthroughs changed the way ocean exploration could be done. Gone were the days of lowering hundreds of feet of cable into the sea and dragging an imaging device through the waters.
The hunt for the R-12 came at a unique time in Taylor’s life. He was set to be married two months later to Dennison, a polar ocean explorer who became an integral part of the expedition. Taylor and Dennison returned to the site a year later with a new underwater vehicle equipped with a high-definition camera. They returned to land with high-resolution images of the R-12.