Sea Mine, French Coast

I won this on eBay.

I thought it was a pretty cool photo.



Resized to 1000 dpi and auto-sharpened.

Dave

 

We just had one detonated by EOD off Brownsville, Washington the other day.

 

According to posts on the warships forum it (the one in Puget Sound) was a left over practice mine.

 

Yep, but it looked the same.

 

Intentionally from what I read.

 

For those interested, while I can't identify the model of this sea mine at the moment I can tell you how it works! This is your typical sea mine, developed prior but used during WW2, that would float at a specific depth chained to the ocean floor with a weight. It's a contact sea mine, those protruding bars are typically filled with a chemical that is used to initiate the chain reaction to set off the mine. They would sit at a depth in the water just low enough to not be detectable above the water but still able to make contact with the underside of a ship. Any number of those bars may be broken by a collision and allow the chemical to initiate the detonation! As a side note this is my first ordnance related post here, if you guys want more technical details or other information let me know, but for now I'll keep explanations pretty simple and try to make them easy to read and understand!