Just after midnight on January 25, 1968, the Israeli Navy's newly commissioned submarine Dakar transmitted her last communication. Disappearing beneath the waves, she went down in the Mediterranean Sea without a trace. Israel spent the next thirty-one years searching for the massive 287-foot submarine and her crew of sixty-nine officers and seamen. After launching more than twenty-five expeditions of their own, the Israeli Navy, in 1996, invited the noted ocean explorer David Jourdan and his company Nauticos to conduct a search that led, three years later, to the Dakar s discovery. With this book Jourdan tells the story of the quest to locate the missing boat, ten thousand feet deep, and to determine the cause of the disaster. It is an exhilarating first-person account of Jourdan s deep-sea search and of the will, endurance, and technical know-how that made it successful. It is also the story of the extraordinary people who made up the lost submarine s crew and the impact they had on an entire nation.
Weaving history with modern-day discovery, the book traces the Dakar from its origins in the British Navy in World War II through its sale to Israel and fateful voyage across the Mediterranean toward its new homeport of Haifa. A dramatic final chapter imagines what the crew of the doomed submarine might have been doing in their final seconds. Throughout the book he follows the families of the lost crew, from their initial pride in the new addition to their country s submarine fleet to their horror at its mysterious loss at sea and to their eventual closure once the wreckage of the submarine had been found. A popular National Geographic documentary about the discovery of the lost submarine, first aired in 2003, has contributed to the public s curiosity about the Dakar. Now the man who found this long missing submarine provides all the details of its fascinating story.