Hey propbeanie!
Good news, I kinda reproduced the situation.
The way I got it to load the save game was counter intuitive!
Previously I was trying to load from a "clean" SH4, that is, reboot pc, start sh4, load save game. Always CTD.
This time I loaded another save game (the one before reaching Truk), and when I failed to find anything in that area in that date, I exited to the SH Main Menu, and reloaded the crooked save game from there, and guess what? It didn't CTD!
But strangely enough, all my navigation marking were gone!
Which was ok, because I had the sonar contact to follow!
And this is what I found:
The Carrier! But not with the Tender, with a small escort instead. And not stationary, but instead moving very very slowly.
The position is strange, because it's not where I found them the first time.
This position is where I found the first stationary destroyer.
But hey, that's a start!
Here is an overview of the situation and my annotations regarding positions:
These are from the subchaser group I escaped contact before sinking the stationary destroyer:
And this is a top view of the Carrier. The top of the image is EAST as I followed with F12 camera, maintaining sub heading:
There seems to be something wrong with her, as you can see from the water level. Also the game was playing "sinking" sounds. And yes, she was like that when I first found and sinked her:
And this is the Tender aerial view, also top of image is North:
Hope that this helps!!
Pedro