This Fishing Vessel Went Missing Without a Trace in 1929. Divers Just Found It Off the Coast of Nantucket

After the captain completed his required daily check-in on January 18, 1929, no one ever saw or heard from the ST “Seiner” again

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

October 1, 2025

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On January 9, 1929, the ST Seiner set sail from New London, Connecticut. On January 18, the captain of the steam-powered fishing trawler made his required daily check-in with the Portland Trawling Company, the ship’s owner. But the next day, he failed to touch base with the company, and on January 22, the vessel missed a scheduled port stop. No one ever saw or heard from the Seiner again.

Now, nearly 100 years later, shipwreck hunters say they have discovered the long-lost vessel off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

The Atlantic Wreck Salvage, a New Jersey-based company that searches for lost shipwrecks, announced this month that it had located the ship on the eastern edge of the Georges Bank area, roughly 125 miles off the coast. The vessel is submerged 200 feet deep.

Officials say they hope the discovery will provide some sense of closure for the descendants of Thomas Miller, the vessel’s captain, and the 20 other crew members who perished with the ship. The men hailed from various parts of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Newfoundland, Canada. Family members are encouraged to reach out to the company.

The Atlantic Wreck Salvage team first discovered the ship using side-scan sonar aboard the D/V Tenacious in 2022. They suspected the wreck was the Seiner, but time and weather constraints prevented them from diving to the wreckage, so they could not confirm its identity.

At the time, they were searching for the wreck of Le Lyonnais, a passenger steamship that sank in 1856 after colliding with a sailing vessel called the Adriatic.

“We were out there scanning the ocean floor and looking for remnants of shipwrecks, and we wound up discovering two new shipwrecks on that trip,” says Jennifer Sellitti, who leads the Atlantic Wreck Salvage team, to CT Insider’s Andrew DaRosa. “Anything that was not Le Lyonnais just got cataloged somewhere and kind of put on a shelf … until we got the wreck that we were really looking for.”

After years of searching, the group located Le Lyonnais in August 2024 roughly 200 miles from New Bedford, Massachusetts. With that project behind them, they returned to the site of the Seiner and made seven dives in late July, which allowed them to positively identify the vessel.

The discovery of a few key features—including a double-drum trawl winch, steam engine and raised forecastle deck—bolstered their confidence that the wreck was the Seiner. The vessel’s length and beam were also a match.

Finding the shipwreck was bittersweet, according to Sellitti. The divers were pleased to have located it after so many years, but they were also saddened by the loss of life it represented.

“There could still be people whose grandparent passed away or uncles or relatives that still may remember,” Sellitti tells CT Insider.

Measuring 139 feet long and made of steel, the Seiner was built by the Rice Brothers Corporation in Boothbay, Maine, in 1921. What happened to the ship in January 1929 isn’t entirely clear, but according to experts with Atlantic Wreck Salvage, the vessel likely foundered in a storm.

The Portland Trawling Company and the U.S. Coast Guard searched for the lost ship and its crew members. “We must be sure,” said the wife of Edward Morgan, the ship’s assistant engineer, according to a newspaper report at the time, per the Boston Globe’s Camilo Fonseca. “It would be better to learn that my husband has died than to be held in such suspense. I haven’t slept one night for a week. But he may still come back!”

Searchers discovered a damaged lifeboat, but they didn’t find any survivors. The ship and its crew were declared lost.

The Seiner is just the latest vessel to be discovered by Atlantic Wreck Salvage. In addition to Le Lyonnais, the group found U-550, a lost World War II-era German submarine that sank off Nantucket. The team also recovered a large navigational instrument called a gyro compass repeater from the Andrea Doria, the luxury trans-Atlantic ocean liner that sank off the coast of Massachusetts in 1956.

The group plans to continue searching for additional wrecks, though it will do so without a key member of the team: Joe Mazraani, who captained the D/V Tenacious with Eric Takakjian. Two days after identifying the Seiner, Mazraani died at the age of 47 while exploring another shipwreck in the Georges Bank area.

“I just keep saying to people, we’re never going to be Joe and we can’t think about being Joe,” Sellitti tells the Inquirer and Mirror’s Kaie Quigley. “But together, we can be something that would make him really proud. … One thing is for certain: We want to continue. We know he would want us to keep moving forward.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.