Another threory, given he bodies were found at their stations and not piled up at the hatch was asphyxiation. They had to wait for the tide to shift as they did not have the energy to row home and they just slowly ran out of oxygen and passed out. we visited her and the cemetery a few years back.
Actually the problem would not have been lack of O2, but rather CO2 build up. I visited the cemetery a few years back myself. Left my dolphins on Lt. Dixon’s grave.
The jury is still out on that one:
Our SCUBA club had a presentation last year by a forensic pathologist who ran some experiments on the crew remains. He was specifically looking for signs of CO2 buildup in their body tissues. His tests were inconclusive but tissue samples were preserved in such a way as to permit future testing by other researchers. I guess at some date — possibly very soon — we will have a conclusive answer as to whether it was the explosion or CO2 poisoning as the primary cause of death.