K XI Submarine, Rottnest Deepwater Graveyard

3D Model

This is the wreck of the K XI submarine, sunk in the Rottnest Deepwater Graveyard in 1946. It was a Dutch submarine operating in the Dutch East Indies up to and during WWII, before escaping to Fremantle after the Japanese took control.

The site was found by Andrew Oakeley (WreckSploration), David Jackson (Diving Western Australia’s Shipwrecks), and Patrick Morrison (WA Museum) in 2025. It was recorded by WreckSploration on the 11th of January 2025. Divers were operating SUEX scooters and GoPro action cameras set to timelapse mode (Anderson et al. 2024). Team 1 (Andrew Oakeley and Matt Kwan) imaged lengthways along the wreck, and Team 2 (Gareth Glasgow and Callum Girvan) imaged it crossways. 6733 images were processed in Agisoft Metashape to produce the final model.

We scaled the model using a 1 m scale bar. The total length from bow to stern was measured as 66.63 ± 0.22 m. This matches historically recorded length of 66.7 m (218.8 ft) to within 7 cm, well within the 22 cm of uncertainty.