Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads Event: Detroit Historical Society Curator Joel Stone Discusses Great Lakes Shipwrecks - Committed to the Deep: Exploring Underwater Treasures

Sat, 02/18/2006 - 1:49pm

When: January 11, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

The very first ship on the upper Great Lakes, LaSalle's Griffon, sailed only a single voyage before disappearing beneath the waves. Since then, thousands of other vessels, along with their crews, have met the same fate. What remains of these ships and cargoes beneath the mighty Great Lakes? Join us for a fascinating journey, as we tour the mysteries of the Lakes through excellent photographs and amazing underwater video with Detroit Historical Society curator Joel Stone. This event will be held in conjunction with Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads 2010, which, this year focuses on the subject of Michigan.

Transcript

• [00:00:10.81] KEN RAYNOR: My name is Ken Raynor and I work at the library in the a Community Relations Department, and I would like to welcome everybody here tonight. Thank you for coming out to see the program which is Committed To The Deep -- Joel Stone, curator of the Detroit Historical Society. We'll be talking about shipwrecks of the Great Lakes and exploring the Great Lakes underwater treasures. Without further ado please a help me welcome Mr. Stone.
• [00:00:51.89] MR. STONE: Thank you Ken. Let me sat that down for a minute. I'd first like to say, as we get started, that I really love libraries. I'm kind of making a tour of libraries, so it's a good thing I like libraries. But I like libraries enough that I married a librarian, so they're very high on my list.
• [00:01:17.07] I'm not sure-- the Detroit Historical Society, and I don't know how many of you are familiar with it--it's an organization that handles two museums and a quarter of million artifacts. We kind of took over the management of the historical properties from the city of Detroit a few years ago. And we run the Detroit Historical Museum on Woodward -- right there in that cultural center, we run the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, which is on beautiful Belle Isle, and we run the Collections, which is Historic Fort Wayne.
• [00:01:47.98] I don't know if you folks are familiar with this. How many are familiar with this? This is one of the greatest inventions of this century so far. It's a museum pass that you can get upstairs for free, and it'll get you into museums all over Southeastern Michigan. It really is a wonderful thing. I say that with a caveat. The Dossin museum is free all the time. Of course all the time is only Saturday and Sunday right now. We're hoping to extend the hours with Saturday and Sunday 11:00 to 4:00. Free all the time. This'll get you into the main museum anytime and that's open Wednesday through Sunday.
• [00:02:23.58] Enough with the first half of my spiel. Tonight we're going to be discussing Exploring Underwater Treasures. Now I've already talked to some of the folks in the audience before, as you were coming in, and it seems many of you are interested in boats, which is probably why you're here. But in particular one of the reasons we put this exhibit, and it is based on an exhibit that we've got at the Dossin Museum right now, is that when you say shipwrecks people come in the door. OK, if I had said this is all about underwater archaeology and it's techniques, not so many people in the door; so we say shipwrecks.
• [00:03:04.05] But what we're really going to be talking about is a whole sea change that has taken place in wreck preservation and understanding of shipwrecks as a historical tool, probably in the last 20 years I would say. If we think about it diving is a relatively new sport, it's a relatively new science. Basically developed after World War II became a recreational thing for those people who are interested in the 60s. And back in the 60s the idea was to find the wreck and bring up some cool stuff and put it on your mantel. And it was cool, I mean that really was. I remember those days and going into somebody's house and seeing something up there -- a binnacle, or seeing a wheel above their fireplace or something; that was really darn cool. Unfortunately, and I'll get into this later, but unfortunately by taking that off of there the divers had ruined the scientific aspect of it. It could be used by anthropologists and archaeologist and historians to tell different things.
• [00:04:11.02] Over the last twenty years that's changed entirely and that's essentially what we're going to talk about. Now if I say shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, what's the first boat you think of? Everybody knows this song, everybody in Nebraska knows this song. This song is widely known. Frankly, I'm not sure that Gordan Lightfoot didn't do us disservice with this song. It's essentially two measures over and over and over again, and if you've ever tried to sing it the poetry is rather stiff. It's hard to sing the poetry, which isn't bad, with the music, which isn't good, and putting the two together. Now that being said Gordon Lightfoot did two things. He brought a real humanity to the people that sailed on the boats, and in this case the people lost their lives on the boats. And he really did that. And he raised the profile of the Great Lakes and the profile of the Great Lakes shipwrecks. So for those two things I'm very thankful to him.
• [00:05:26.18] The Great Lakes is an incredible body of water, and it's a body of water that many of us take for granted. It's got its own characters, it's you know its own culture. By its very nature, the fact that it's five separate lakes--huge lakes if you've ever been out on them--huge lakes, but based on their depths, based on their size, it's completely different than any other sailing in the world. It's got a wave action that's completely unlike the ocean.
• [00:05:55.94] On the ocean the waves are long. Waves are governed by wind but they're also governed by depth. I mean there's a lot of physics I don't understand involved in it, but waves on the ocean are relatively long. On the lakes waves are pretty quick and their short and they're very steep, so that you're going up. And instead of nice wells, you're really pitching quite a bit in any kind of an action, you know even a light chop.
• [00:06:19.02] On the ocean if you get into a storm you can run. You turn and you run, and you run for days. In the lakes if you turn and your run you may have four or five hours before you got to figure something else out or you hit the beach.
• [00:06:31.92] Rivers, lots of rivers, I mean besides the St Mary's, besides the Detroit and the Saint Clair rivers, which are tricky. You've got things like the Cuyahoga and the little Calumet over in Chicago; small rivers that require some real handling, some real skill, some boatmanship.
• [00:06:49.61] Shallow harbors, especially earlier on in the nature of the lakes' maritime, the harbors themselves needed to be dredge all the time and if the government didn't pay for it, it probably didn't get done, in which case the boats were built differently than they were on the ocean.
• [00:07:04.05] Frequent stops. On the ocean you load your boat you go for two or three weeks before you have to unload it. Here you load your boat, you go for two days if you're lucky, and you're on loading it. And you know it may take two days to unload a boat on the ocean. It may take three or four hours to unload a boat on the lakes; they've really got it down to a science. So you're parking the boat a lot, you're getting the boat away from the dock, and you've got to do all the work that is involved in unloading. And primary cargos, you know much of the ocean cargo has all gone to container ships now, you know those truck-like things that they take on and set off pretty quick.
• [00:07:42.87] But on the Great Lakes it's essentially coal or stone, cement, sand, things that we have now figured out a way to move very quickly. So it's a whole different nature to the Great Lakes than it would be on the ocean. Because of that, the nature of shipboard life is completely different too. It's a stable workforce generally. Around here you may work on the same boat for years and years and years, which is not usually the way of case on the ocean.
• [00:08:10.91] Chances are you also know the people that you're working with; they've been in the same local as you, they belong to the same lodges as you, very often they come from the same town. When we lost the Bradley it was underscore; we lost the whole half you know half the men in the town in a night. Kind of a problem -- that doesn't happen on the ocean. Government regulation here is very stiff. It's kind of a problem depending on where you're standing, but government regulations are very good on the Great Lakes. And they eat well, they have good places to sleep. If you're riding in a Liberian freighter chances are your bunk hasn't been cleaned in years and it's very small.
• [00:08:52.17] On the Great Lakes it's like living in a hotel. And the safety factors are huge. Amenities and perks. Well one of the perks is you get at least four months off during the winter, by the very nature of it. You're also sailing close to home. If you've gotta go to a graduation, if you've got to go to a wedding, you can probably do that, and those guys eat better than any sailor's in the world. OK they're in port every other day, at the very least. They can get fresh vegetables, they can get fresh food. If they want a pizza the Westcott will deliver it to them as they go down the Detroit River.
• [00:09:31.11] And there's a whole nomenclature that's adapted to the Great Lakes that's unlike the ocean. We call them boats. They can be a thousand feet long and you call them boats, their not ships. Wheelsman the guy that steers whereas in the ocean it would be homesman or a steersman. So, the nature of the Great Lakes maritime is completely different.
• [00:09:52.41] Let's run through a few of the ships. If we're talking about shipwrecks let's look at what the guys looking for wrecks are looking for. A general timeline of boats over the last three, four centuries. Canoes, an excellent source of transportation, tremendous source of transportation for what it was used for. Sailing ships came in and they had a general European designed for a long time and then they adapted to the Great Lakes. Bulk carriers came in about 1830, 1840. Cellphone loaders and passenger packets were also a major part of the business.
• [00:10:27.65] Canoes, their light. You can build them on the side of any lake and you can fix them on the side of any lake. Put a hole in it, you pull it up, you got some birch bark and some tar, and you got it fix in a few hours and you're on your way. Incredibly versatile; it will carry up to three or four tons of cargo. Of course you gotta have a lot of people to move it but that doesn't seem to be a problem.
• [00:10:49.42] Early on, again, the European design ships. This would've been the Nancy. It was built in Detroit. It was sailed first up their Mackinac. John Askin owned it; he was a Detroit trader, brought it down to Detroit. The British confiscated it during the Revolutionary War, and they ended up burning it over in Georgian Bay. The USS Michigan, a revolutionary boat, the first iron-hauled ship in the US Navy, and for a long time it was the fastest boat in the US Navy, until after the Civil War. It was involved in all kinds of altercations including the Civil War and the pirates of Beaver Island and the lumber tree robbers of Lake Michigan. And just all kinds of actions right up through the for the second World War it was finally scraped, so the boat lasted 100 years.
• [00:11:46.18] Schooners - topsail schooners in this case, classic Great Lakes schooners , three-master, probably the most prevalent of boats. At any given time -- 1870 eighteen seventy, there were 2,000 of these boats on the lakes. Sailing up and down, mostly caring lumber. They weren't very good with ore because it was really hard on their hauls, but they also carried a lot of grain.
• [00:12:08.82] There was a variation on this. Oh, and I should mention the triangular four sail there was particular the Great Lakes called the raffee, and the only place you'll find it is on the Great Lakes. Similar to that is the scow. If you look at this boat closely, you'll realize that the front end is dead flat, the back end is dead flat, the sides are dead flat; it's a slab. And these boats were built fast. They were built easy. You didn't have to be a master shipwright or master carpenter to build these things; you could put them together. They were essentially like shoe boxes; mostly built out of green wood. If they lasted ten years the owners got more money out of the them than they ever expected. They also were very hard to sail, so they lost lots and lots of these ships.
• [00:12:54.40] Eventually, they found that by adding steam to a boat or just making the boat bigger, they could just turn it into a barge. Most of the schooners ended as barges, getting pulled, in this manner, by a tug. Once we got steaming and started getting strong tug boats, they'd pull them up and down the rivers.
• [00:13:13.81] As we see here this would have been the Detroit River, just above Belle Isle, and the Champion. It's called the Champion and their tugboat -- it was probably the most famous lithogram about 1875, 1880-- done by a Detroiter. It shows that the Champion is towing eight schooners. Seven of them were full and one of them was empty, but it was the heaviest dead--weight tow ever done on the Great Lakes. The thing that came out of this was they found that as you were towing them up and down the river, why bother letting them go; just keep towing them. You get them there faster, you make money, and eventually that's what they do.
• [00:13:50.67] And instead of a tugboat, they'd put a freighter on the front of it, kind of the precursor of our freighter; this was known as the lumber hooker. I've been told it's because you could pull up to the side of any creek and throw a hooked on the bank and keep yourself there; that's what I've been told. But anyways these hookers would tow two or three barges, you know the would have two or three men on them. And that's the way that they made lots of money. Lots of the barges got lost, oddly enough, in storms. If the boat in the front let the barges go, very often the barges survived and the boat did not, which I think it's just fair.
• [00:14:30.22] An usual type of craft that was on the Great Lakes, developed by Alexander McDougall, we call them whalebacks, and they were basically just cigar boats. They were rounded so that the idea was that the waves just passed right over the top of them that they hardly even felt them if they weren't crashing. They're actually very stable boats; they were just very hard to unload--proved and practical.
• [00:14:54.45] Canal tankers -- these boats were made to run up and down the New York State Barge Canal. The pilothouse and the Mass -- the pilothouse actually telescopes into the hull, and the Mass lay down flat so they can go under bridges and things like that. And then we get the classic straight decker. The Edmund Fitzgerald here, but hundreds and hundreds of boats just like this boat, each of the hatch is placed at the very same distance apart, so that they could pull up to the ore docks in two harbors or to Duluth Superior. Marquette, Escanaba, and their chutes would all come down right where the hatches were, and they could load these boats in a matter of an hour or two. And then when they'd get back down below, they had devices that would unload them; that would take sometimes two days.
• [00:15:45.75] Until they came up with this type of craft, which had its own self-unloading device, had a kind of a conveyor belt that ran through the hull, and then up to the conveyor that was on the arm that could swing off to either side. The boats could unload itself, it didn't need any unloading gear, it could unload anywhere. It could pull up to any bank, any place, just like the hookers, and they could just pull that arm over and load any cargo it's got wherever it's ask for.
• [00:16:15.14] And now we've got huge vessels. These vessels just kept getting longer and longer and now the longest vessel is 1,013 feet long. And they are, they're just moving buildings. They are like huge warehouses -- I mean thats three football fields. And again these things can unload themselves in a few hours using that device. And they'll just pull up, you can see it in the Sinclair River sometimes, near the Edison plant. They've got a hopper there and right next to the plant, and that guy just pulls up and sticks that arm right in the hopper, and it goes from one conveyor belt to another conveyor belt and off of the plant; I mean it doesn't even stop on a pile.
• [00:16:55.25] Going back just a little bit, I thought this was appropriate to use, there were car ferries that ran on Lake Michigan primarily, but they also ran on Lake Erie, and these carried railroad cars back and forth. It was just an extension of the railroad. And they ran for years and years and years until trucking, of course put them out of business.
• [00:17:15.43] And I should note that most of the ships we've been looking at have been wrecked. Marquette and Bessemer we talked about earlier this year. It was wrecked a hundred years ago in December, and...December yes? Is that right? Yeah December, and Mr. McLeod -- here, I just have to point out -- his great grandfather was the first mate, and his great-great uncle was the captain, and we had a ceremony which I'll explain a little later.
• [00:17:49.77] [? Dees ?] is also a [? carrier ?] [? freight ?], but this ran up at McKenna, and these guys had to deal much more with ice. This was an interesting design and was designed by a guy in Detroit -- Frank Kirby, and he's the first guy that put a on the front of an ice breaker, which actually would suck the water out from under the ice, collapse the ice, and then it was easy to break.
• [00:18:09.16] And then we had smaller vessels. This is a classic lakes fishing tug. There's still many of these out there, but there used to be hundreds. This is one of the passenger packets that I mentioned. These were some of the earlier boats on the lakes, starting after Michigan became a state. After the Erie Canal opened and traffic grew incredibly, they would carry hundreds of people, and they would also carry all their baggage and all the stuff that were already there, that people already there wanted. So, they were carrying bulk cargoes, they were caring people, they're carrying all kinds of things.
• [00:18:45.01] The Lady Elgin, of course, probably the most famous shipwreck, passenger wreck on the lakes, that actually happened in the lakes. The Eastland---We lost more people sitting in the Chicago River, but these guys actually were wrecked in Lake Michigan. And then some passenger liners that we'd have around here like the Bob--lo boats and Tashmoo. The Tashmoo used to run up and down from Detroit to port here and every day. It was a regular run. You'd go up to one of the parks or resorts up the St. Clair River, and stop in port here if you wanted to, and then come all the way back and you'd be home in the evening. It was relatively inexpensive. I was a nice way to spend the day. And in the days before air conditioning, getting on a boat like this, it was traveling about 10 knots, and a nice cool like breeze--it was a real nice way to spend the day.
• [00:19:31.90] Of course the boats got bigger. This is one of the big passenger steamers that ran out of Detroit; the city of Detroit three. The only part really that remains of it is at the Dossin Museum, so I'm always happy to show this off. But this boat was, you know 400 feet long, would carry 600 passengers, you know had lots of state rooms, several restaurants, a band, places to go and relax; these floating palaces. The fact that would have been the inside, and then you can see kind of the inside state rooms coming off the grand staircase there. So shipwrecks--Those are essentially the boats there we're looking for if we're looking for shipwrecks.
• [00:20:16.91] It's hard to tell how many wrecks there are. First of all the records in the early years were very sketchy. Both names would transfer even after a wreck, and some of the records had been lost; it's just hard to put that together. It's also hard to decide what is a shipwreck. You know lots of wrecks would sink, and then they go out and then raise them again. You know, did that count as a ship wreck? And you know in the storm of 1913 some of the boats that got blown up on the beach were counted as shipwrecks during that storm, and yet some of them were floated and then used again. So, depending on how you categorize them, you know 3,000.
• [00:21:00.15] David Swayze, who's got a great website if you're really into looking at shipwrecks -- Dave Swayze has done a wonderful job of cataloging, and he says, you know 4,700; there are people that say up to 6,000 shipwrecks. So, it's really...that's kind of wide open. But leave it to say that if we go with the small number with 3,000, and if you imagine that there's 10 or 15 people on average working on each of those boats, you can do the math and figure out how many sailor's we've lost. And then we're not talking even the passengers that were lost in some of the packets and things like that.
• [00:21:35.24] So it gets pretty rough out there. And you talked to Great Lakes sailors and they'll tell you they see this stuff all the time. There's a lot of times that the guy up at the wheel will turn around and the only thing he sees is the smoke stack. And, you know when you see pictures like this and you realize that this is a relatively calm day, couldn't been too bad if the guys out there taking up photograph. You know imagine the kind of stuff that the Fitzgerald was going through and many other of those; yeah, yep. Well but because it's small that means it's waves are closer together and choppier, so that's kind of a problem.
• [00:22:11.69] The first of the ship wrecks, the first of big boat built on the Great Lakes, built by La Salle back in 1679, made one trip, not even a full trip, and made a half a trip, and then we're not sure about the rest. It sales from Black Rock where it was built. La Salle built it there, along the European Lines, and he sailed on over to Green Bay where he had some traders waiting with a load of furs. And he loaded it up and he sent it off while he went south. He was heading for Chicago; well he was headed in the area where Chicago is now. And that later that day and into the next day a big storm came up and nobody is sure what happened to his ship. It has become the holy grail.
• [00:22:57.79] You know I've heard holy grail used for the Bessemer because it hasn't been found in a hundred years and that's kind of unusual on a small lake. But this has not been found, although they do find it about every 20 years. And they make some really convincing arguments that this is the boat. They'll go to the French government and get them to write off on it, and that kind of thing; and sure, this sure looks like it might be--and very sincere people.
• [00:23:23.74] The most recent is a gentleman from Virginia who has a summer home up north, and he believes he's found it, right about where that arrow is pointing. And he's basing that on a projecting pole. There was something down there that looks like a log or a small telephone pole that he has located that he is convinced is the bowsprit of the ship, and then the rest of the ship has been silted over And he's gone so far, as it's gone to court -- you've probably read about this -- this has been quite a case . He's gone so far as to get the French government involved because, of course, it's their boat officially, and Michigan wishes to go out and do the surveying and stuff. I don't think they're going to dig it up. I think they want to do some noninvasive surveys, some electronic surveying. But he got France to bring a claim and France, I think, is probably going to win it.
• [00:24:17.59] It's going to come down pretty close for a couple of reasons. When the Savannah sunk over near France during the Civil War and it was found, the United States claimed it, and the French agreed; it was our boat and we got it back. I think we gave the salvage and study rights to a university in France. La Salle's other boat the La Belle was found down in Texas near Galveston about, I think, about 15 years ago. And they again brought up lawsuits as this went, and the French claimed that. And after the Savannah the United States said well sure, you can have that. France gave the salvage and the study rights, I think, to Texas A & M; so there's precedent in this.
• [00:24:57.51] I think the French will probably get control and the guy from Virginia will get control of the site in order to do something with it. What he's going to do we're not quite sure. He has done some carbon dating, and it does date to within the range, but then again so would a log that had died during that time and floated out to the middle and gone to the bottom. So it's going to be interesting to see. They'll find it again some place else relatively soon.
• [00:25:20.62] [AUDIENCE MEMBER ASKS QUSTION] Yes that's his name, Steve Lipford is the gentleman. So the question is once you find a boat -- and Steve Lipford has gone to a lot of trouble, and a lot of people who look for these boats go to all kinds of trouble. In fact there's a gentleman Daryl here who does this kind of thing; he'll tell you what kind of trouble that they go to the find these boats. And it can be as easy as walking down the beach.
• [00:25:47.86] This is down and near Ogden Dunes, and it's right there on the beach. You can walk up and touch it, you can sit on it, you can look at the way it was built. We're guessing it's a schooner, I'm pretty sure it's a schooner. There's some question it might have been involved in the underground railroad, but they haven't been able document that. But it's right on the beach or sometimes you just look under the water and it'll be there waiting for you.
• [00:26:13.08] This one's up in Tobermory, and there's several of these wrecks right below the surface, up in Littleton. If you go right over them in your canoe, and you kayak, you take a look at them. But they're usually not this easy. Usually it takes going out and digging through old newspapers.
• [00:26:37.71] Here's one that we've blown up a piece of. These two boats collided, and it was just off Menominee River, opposite Middle Island. So if I'm looking for the wrecks, I can go out and kind of use those coordinates. That'll give me an idea where to search; that's a possibility.
• [00:26:54.57] This is a piece out of a log book. This would have been 1856. And this guy had just left the Welland Canal, and he's sailing up and he passes what's left of a schooner, with her lower mastheads out of the water -- about 6 to 10 feet, or a main top mast sat down, and I think he gives some idea of where it is. But if you took his log -- and you'd figured out how far he had sailed, what direction he was sailing -- you would have a pretty good idea of where that ship was. So, this is really old school. This is the way they used to do it and they still do it. They try to get a basic idea of where the boat is, a particular boat, and then they start throwing in the technology.
• [00:27:38.11] OK, this is a sonar fish. This is the thing that you tow behind your boat, and it'll give you a picture of what's on the bottom. You can see the fish along the bottom there. There's a reel of electrical cord cable that then attaches into a computer. And it will give you...well let's see.
• [00:27:54.66] First, to show you what it looks like, if you're going along -- some people tow a camera down just to give them an idea what they're going to run over. And if they keep the fish just far enough back from that, then they will see something like this as they travel by, and then they basically go back and forth until they find something; they call this mowing the lawn. And you just you go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and you spend a lot of time out there not finding stuff.
• [00:28:24.21] But as Daryl and I were both saying, even if you don't find something spent the day on the boat; it can't be that bad. When they finally do get something -- this is what a picture will look like coming out of there -- they'll see some things that look like...you can see kind of an underwater trench there, a wreck, clearly a man made object off to the left, and then something that looks suspicious off to the right. If you've got really really good equipment and the conditions are perfect, you'll get something like this, where you can count the ribs in that boat -- either one of those boats -- you can almost tell where they hit, you can almost tell which way they hit the bottom, and you can tell what kind of boats they are. So if you know you're looking for a 200--foot schooner, at least one of those is going to come into the 200-foot schooner range.
• [00:29:16.62] So, the next thing is you go down and you take a look around and this, again, old school. This is the old way they used to do it and this was a lot of work and a lot of guys died doing this. They did this both diving wrecks and to build things like the Brooklyn Bridge, and even as late as the bridge up at Mackinac and the Ambassador Bridge. They've use things like this to go down and put in case on.
• [00:29:40.18] But that's kind of a tough way to go. They've improved that a whole lot. The person to the right there, pretty typical scuba stuff. And this will get you down to a 100, 125 comfortably -- feet of water. And you can spend a fair amount of time there because, of course, you can go down pretty quick but you gotta come back up. Anybody that's done any diving knows if you don't come up slowly you get the bends. Once you get passed a 150 feet you got to get into some pretty technical stuff, and they call it technical diving.
• [00:30:10.40] The guy on the left is rigged for technical diving. He's carrying three different times types of gases, and he will mix those gases in different amounts, the farther he goes down. And this kind of stuff will get you down to easily 250, and I've heard more than 300. But once you get down there you're really treading thin because you probably have a very small window. There's only so much gas you've got. You can only be under water so much time, and the farther down you go the longer it takes to come up; so, there are trade offs. But you can get to boats that you can't get to any other way except by using one of these things.
• [00:30:54.10] This is the suit that dove on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Fitzgerald sits in about 530 feet of water, so this will get you down much further. This is the hard-shell suit. The arms are articulated, but I don't think there's much movement there. and you're pretty dependent on the guy on the cable that's upstairs on the boat above you. You probably have a propulsion unit that you use as this kind of thing, but it's... [AUDIENCE MEMBER SPEAKING] camera or a light -- yeah, yeah -- or maybe both.
• [00:31:22.00] A little bit more expensive, if you can go this way, is you get your own submarine; that'll get you down quite a ways. But, for a whole lot more money there is a cheaper way of going, and those are remotely operated vehicles -- ROVs. This one actually is a shot of an ROV on the Titanic. And these things can go down thousands of feet, and they can do most of the things that a human at that depth couldn't even imagine doing, and there's absolutely no danger to a diver. This is all monitored by people with computers and monitors up on a ship, and it's a real, real safe way of going to get the same, much of the same, information.
• [00:31:59.40] Once you've found a wreck and once you've realized the basic layout of it, the first thing you want to do, absolutely first thing you want to do is start documenting it. Especially these days, wrecks are changing very very rapidly. The lake levels are going up and down; I don't think that's any different than it has been for 200 years.
• [00:32:16.66] There has been a little bit of a change. Some of the lakes are about two feet lower than they have been traditionally. But zebra mussels -- the zebra mussels are taking over all our boats and there's not a thing we can do about it. So, if you can find a boat and it's in any kind of shape, document it quick before it's completely covered. There is a good thing -- the deeper you go the less the zebra mussels get to it. After about a 100 and 125 feet, there's very little zebra muscle activity, but again you're at the bottom end of what normal divers can dive at. So, one way to document it is, again, you can do this by diving on it, you can do it with an ROV, but go down and take pictures. And then you take the pictures and you put them together, and you've got kind of a mosaic of what a vessel looks like, and a real good idea. You can make some great drawings off of this.
• [00:33:05.13] You also can go down, especially in shallower water, and do a transect on it. Actually put down a center line and that line would run from the bow of the stern. And then people would go along and mark how far how things were off to the side -- before they move anymore, before the other divers get down there . And most divers are pretty darn careful , but even the most careful diver can stir up a wreck; can change the way things look. And remember one of the things that archaeologist and anthropologist are looking at--anthropologist, of course, are looking for--and you'll often find it, what were these people eating when the boat went down. And sometimes these things happen so fast that the guys are actually eating, and you can see what they were eating when the ship went down.
• [00:33:46.43] But also, what angle? You can tell what angle the boat hit the bottom at by the way things fell and crashed. And surprisingly boats you think went down at the bow went down at the stern. And these are things you only fine by looking at a wreck and analyzing it quickly. If you do bring stuff up, and sometimes we do bring stuff up, there're advantages to doing that. Sometimes things have obviously been misplaced, they've been moved out of their original position; there's nothing to lose by bring them up if there's a story to be told or if there's a chance that they're going to be lost. I mean if they're in real shallow water and you know the zebra mussels are going to get them, there are reasons to do that. Then you bring them up and you do some conservation and you do it fast.
• [00:34:27.49] This is up at Alpena, at the preserve that they've got up there. We've got a great Noah preserve up there, and they've got a beautiful museum. If you get a chance the museum opened just a couple of years ago, and they've done a real nice job of interpreting all of the Great Lakes. But more importantly the shipwreck aspect of it, because there's a great sanctuary up there, and these are things that they brought off of different wrecks, in the sanctuary. Great job for underpaid college interns. We'd take advantage of them ourselves if the CRC...
• [00:35:01.82] But you can imagine all the different things, and some of these things--I mean you'd treat wood different, then you'd metal different, then you'd treat the marble that they're bringing up--and that's the science behind the conservation part.
• [00:35:13.45] A great story that we tell in our exhibit -- and you gotta come down and see this -- it's the story of the Alvin Clark and I called it the Tale of Two Disasters. The Alvin Clark was a real nice little two-master, and it was basically trading in lumbar between Green Bay and ports in Michigan. It was one of those lumber thieves that I was talking about earlier. But they were sailing back empty. They'd gone back to Green Bay to pick up something and so it was completely empty, no ballast. And they got one of those little squally winds that comes along, and it just tipped the boat right over, and it filled with water and sank, like that. And they were having dinner when it happened. Boat went down. The boat is 105 feet long I went down in 105 feet of water and was on the bottom for 105 years. Guys who give presentations love numbers like that. But it sat on the bottom until a group of divers--well actually some fisherman were out fishing with nets and the nets got tangled. And they paid a guy who owned a bar in Menominee to go out -- the guy in the center with the striped shirt, Frank Hoffman -- they paid them to go out and get their nets back. And when he went out he went down and came down on this schooner. And if you imagine, the schooner was in 105 feet of water and it probably had about 80--foot mast, so he didn't have to go down very far to find these masts. And the farther he went down these masts the more he realized that this boat was an absolutely perfect shape. I mean it was as it had gone. The sails had deteriorated, some of the mast hoops had sprung, so it wasn't in perfect shape, but it was as close as it could be. So he got a bunch of his diving buddies and they started raising money, and they got a lot of people behind them, and they went out and they raised the boat. They actually brought it up with bubbles on either side and they got it into shallow water, and then they went out with these cranes.
• [00:37:01.31] You gotta remember Menominee has a couple of ship--building companies there, so they had this kind of stuff. So... [AUDIENCE MEMBER SPEAKING] Were you really? That must have been very cool. So, then they went out and they raised it between these cranes, and then they threw in some pumps. And they pump the boat out -- and tell me this is right -- the boat floated. There was nothing wrong with this boat; it just stayed floated. They didn't even have to...I mean if you own a wooden boat you know that you gotta put the boat in the water and let it expand overnight. They didn't have to let expand -- it had been expanding 105 years. So they took the boat into Menominee and they turn it into a museum, or at least that was the idea. And people came from all over. This boat was hailed as the greatest find in maritime archaeology around the world. It was the oldest working schooner still floating. It was a Great Lakes schooner. It was one of a kind. This is a particular type of sailing craft that they found. Yeah, it was a great thing.
• [00:38:00.10] And this is what the boat looked like after they clean it up. Compare that with that pictures we saw of the same windlass couple of pictures ago. It was just in spectacular shape.
• [00:38:11.21] Howard Chapelle is the name of that boat. Guys know Howard Chapelle was kind of the dean of maritime history at the Smithsonian and this is what he said, "This is the greatest find, this is a treasure." We can put together the real work-a-day craft of the past; what people were actually working on. This is the kind of PR this guy was getting. The problem was he was out of money and nobody else was coming up with money. The states turned him down. Both Wisconsin and Michigan turn him down. The feds turn him down.
• [00:38:43.72] This is back in the 70s and 80s. We didn't have the preservation in place, the preservation tools that we now have to save buildings, to save automobiles, to save ships like this. And frank ran dead end to that wall, and he just couldn't by a break. And it got to be real sad story. At one point he was so bad that he set the ship on fire and stood there with a shotgun and held off the cops. And we're talking Menominee -- he knows these cops; they drinking in his bar. And they finally talked him down and they put the fire out, but they ended up having to bulldoze the ship. It was completely dry rotted within 15 years. It took fifteen years to dry rot a schooner, if anybody wanted to know that. And it just got to the point where you couldn't let people on the boat anymore, and they bulldozed it and put in a landfill.
• [00:39:39.73] So, from triumph to tragedy -- it probably darn near killed him. He moved to Florida and he didn't live long after that. The only good part being that before he set it on fire he called the curator at the Dossin Museum, which was at that time one of a very few number of museums that was on the Great Lakes doing Great Like history. And he said John, bring a truck, because he had creditors that wanted parts of this boat; anything they could sell. They were going to take it down to antique stores and sell it off at a penny on the pound. And so they load up a truck with anything that would fit in the van. And John brought it back and he hid it in the back room of the Dossin because we had no rights of this stuff and if it ever came out, who knows what would happen?
• [00:40:26.76] Well, when I came on board I found this stuff and I figured it'd been 25 years and Frank's dead, and probably most of the creditors are dead, and we've had it -- finders keepers kind of thing. So, we put it on exhibit. In this exhibit, it's the first time this stuff from the Alvin Clark has been out there. And one of our model makers had made us a model of the cabin of the ship. And you can look at the model and see the captain's door that's got these turning louvers on it, and you can look over and see the door that's got the louvers on it. You can look at the dining room table that they used to use, and there's the dining room table. You can look at the pots and pans and the clock, and we got a couple of stoves off of it, and all that stuff is in the exhibit.
• [00:41:12.23] Now of course, the Dossin not being a huge museum, it's not a huge amount of stuff. We've got more of it and storage, but at least now it's all categorized. It's all out there and people know we've got it.
• [00:41:24.69] I talk about a sea change and a sea change has taken place, and Michigan has been at the forefront of that sea change. In fact there's actually a mistake on this and I'm going to point it out because I'm really proud of it. In red are the preserves that Michigan has created, where there are a spectacular number of wrecks. In any place where there was an unusual number of wrecks-- either because of the topography, the underwater, or the lay of the land because of the way the wind's came in. Of course the straits are a natural because these boats use to run into each other all the time there.
• [00:41:57.15] Over here, the big one off of Alpena, the Thunder Bay, and they just expanded that one; that's one that's even larger now. And then there's that spot down there in green that I thought was going to be in Ohio; an Ohio preserve. But the day it was supposed to go the governor was supposed to sign it. Evidently people who own that-- was right around the islands down there, the Bass Island and yeah Put-in-Bay, that kind of stuff-- the people who own the properties there were so afraid that they'd never be able to even like wander into the their beach and pick up a rock or something anymore that they didn't pass it. I thought they actually had and I talk to somebody from Ohio and he said it didn't happen. So Michigan's got the only preserves.
• [00:42:42.03] Wisconsin's working on one or two and they may get them soon. Ohio, maybe yes maybe no. There are couple in New York on the lakes the Finger Lakes, and Champlain's got one I believe. But Michigan's got 13, and we're really leading. And these things are great because all the wrecks are documented and there are some that we're still looking for, so that there are teams that go there and look for them.
• [00:43:04.50] The preserves maintain buoys on the wrecks, so if you're a diver and you want to see it, first of all you got a little booklet that tells you how to get there, what to find, what to look for, and you don't have to toss your anchor over on to the top of the wreck and wreck the wreck; you can tie off to the buoy and you're all set. So. I mean we're really taking us to a new level, and people are doing a great job of it.
• [00:43:28.27] We're also doing a lot more educating. This is a group that sails out of Mount Clemens. There's also a group out of Port Huron, but these guys are associated with the navy; their navy sea cadets. It's kind of a junior status, but these guys come from all over the country. They apply for this program. I think the only take about 15 folks -- both men and women -- and they teach them not only things like bathymetry and... yeah and basic navigation, and they operate as cadets; they run this boat. There are adult captains on board who make sure that the boats run properly, but they run the boat. But they also teach them to dive and they teach them archaeology. These guys have gone out and found -- they've done a lot of diving in the Alpena preserve, they've done some diving north of there where they have found some sink holes that evidently have some real under subterrestrial origins.
• [00:44:26.33] There's water coming out of there that's salinated. We're trying to figure out where that's coming from. These guys found a waterfall up at Mackinac and the straits. If you're going over the bridge and if you were to look down off to the east, there actually is a place where a prehistoric river ran and a huge waterfall that was just a little bit smaller Niagara Falls. And what they went up for -- and I haven't heard the results of this year -- they went up looking...there were caves off to the sides of this waterfall -- so they're looking for human habitation within the caves. And these are high school kids. This is pretty cool stuff to be doing as a high school kid. And it's also raising the awareness of what's under water, the tool of the great resources that are under water, and spreading it across the country. This is a very well run, well respected program called the Noble Odyssey Foundation. And you know they also do shipwreck diving, which is probably after you get done going into caves enough, looking at the shipwrecks is probably pretty cool.
• [00:45:25.14] And as far as supporting Great Lakes history, there are a lot of them. the Dossin was the first building purposely built to teach Great Lakes history. Back in 1949 we opened in a schooner, which eventually rotted and we burned it, which you couldn't do today. And we had a building built. In 1960 this building opened, so we're celebrating our 15th anniversary this year. Back then we were 1 of about 4 -- there was a museum over in Kingston, there was a museum down in Vermilion, and then there's a museum over in Duluth. Now there's probably about oh I'd say 17 or 18 museums, on top of another dozen museum ships, on top of about 60 lighthouses.
• [00:46:17.89] So, the feeling for Great Lakes history has grown and it's being supported probably by the government, but much more importantly, it's being supported by us; people who love light houses, people who love wrecks, people who love Great Lakes history. We're doing that at the Dossin. There is this gothic room, the smoking room off the City of Detroit -- three that I mentioned -- which came off the boat and then was lovingly inserted into our lobby about 6 years after the building was built, and it's a beautiful beautiful version.
• [00:46:50.13] If you want to see an example steamboat gothic, this is gothic office steamboat. The room has a stained glass window at the far end which came, it was there on the boat. The room also had a pipe organ. it was the men's smoking lounge, although I've been told women go there. Just off to the side here was the cigar stand off of the Western States, another DNC boat, and it was a cigar stand because the DNC didn't sell cigarettes. They'd sell liquor, they'd sell cigars, they'd sell pipe tobacco, and they had one--armed bandits on the boat, but you couldn't buy cigarettes. And I always thought that was an interesting cut; I'm not sure how they did that.
• [00:47:32.79] Couple of the other things of note that we've got their of course the Dossin family was big race fans. They owned Miss Pepsi because they had the pepsi bottling distributorship in town for a long time. So, we've got Miss Pepsi -- beautiful piece of mahogany if anybody's into wooden boats, that's a spectacular one.
• [00:47:51.09] Couple of our recovery things that we did in the 80s and 90s, we went out and found the anchor from the Edmund Fitzgerald. The Fitzgerald had been anchored down at the bottom of Belle Isle. There's a fairway there that if you're not going any place for couple days you can drop anchor. And they did and when they raised the chain all they got was the chain. And the anchor stayed there and they went up to Duluth. I'm sure there was another one waiting for them when they got there. But after the Fitzgerald sank, some of the folks who had been crew had told us about this, and we went out there with a magnetometer, another search tool that these under water, and especially on a large piece of iron. And we were able to locate it and get the support of some of the local tugboat companies and barge companies, and went and raised the anchor and put it there with the support of hundreds of people whose names around the plaque around there.
• [00:48:40.15] And we also have the pilot house and William Clay Ford. The William Clay Ford was one of the Ford fleet. Ford had at one time owned his own boats and named the after sons in most cases. But this boat has a connection to the Fitzgerald because this is the boat that went out to look for the Fitzgerald. The Arthur Andersen had been following the Fitzgerald and is probably the most notable of the boats connected with Fitzgerald. But there were some boats sitting in White Fish Bay, sitting out the storm. They knew it was bad. They were down. It was about 6:30, 7:05 I think when the call came over; the guys were having dinner. A call came over and they said we can't find it Fitz. And the captain did a quick survey and they went and raised the anchor, and they went into the same storm to look for the Fitzgerald. And we got charts. They actually went right over the spot where the Fitzgerald was; they knew where it was, it was just way too late.
• [00:49:31.36] But we do have the pilot house there. It's an absolutely spectacular shape; it's just the way it was when it was sailing. This is Captain Don Erickson who was the captain that night. He'd often come up and sit in his chair and tell you anything you want to know about sailing a freighter boat. It's a wonderful thing to have, but it's also one of the best views on the river. And when the wind's blowing out of the west and the currents flowing to the east, that river can chop up pretty good. People have claimed they get seasick standing, so.
• [00:50:03.75] And of course this is what we've got part of, the exhibit committed to the deep. It was one of those classic old brass hard-head suits, probably goes back about 108, 110 years. And then there's the model of the Alvin Clark. That's what we do for Great Lakes' history. And I've got a few brochures here. I didn't bring many because you guys are kind of far flung, but we like to think of the Detroit Historical Society. But each of the local organizations, local communities has their own historical society; Royal Oak, Birmingham, Ann Arbor, pontiac, and Plymouth, they all have their own historical organization. The Detroit Circle Society, we kind of go Toledo to Ann Arbor to Port Huron; that's kind of our scope, and then at the Dossin we'd go whole Great Lakes. So, we like to think that the you guys are part of us and if anybody's interested I have memberships, I have volunteers if you're interested in doing that.
• [00:50:58.31] One of my hopelish feels, I've gotta tell you, is one of the things the Detroit's Historical Society did recently was produce a book on Detroit during the Revolutionary War. It has a few stories about boats in it, but it's really not a boat book; it's a book about the Revolution. If anybody's interested in the eras of the revolution, especially on the frontier and Detroit really was the frontier -- there wasn't much before or after once you got on the Great Lakes -- I'd be happy to talk with you after that; it's really reasonably priced. But back to my spiel.
• [00:51:31.41] One of the things we do -- we do a couple of things as support it besides just having a museum open. We have every November 10th, the day the Fitzgerald sank. We have a lost mariners memorial that we hold f museum. We light lanterns for the sailors on the Fitzgerald, and we've done this for years. In the past few years we've kind of gotten a little bit away from the Fitzgerald; we realize we were only honoring 29 men out of the thousands and thousands and thousands that have been lost out there, so we've kind of switched it over. And it's now lost Mariner's Memorial. This year we did the Marquette and Bessemer. Last year we did the Bradley, the Carl Bradley, and we try to feature different vessel, which gives everybody a different idea of how many craft have been lost on the Great Lakes.
• [00:52:17.20] As safe as sailing is, as safe as these big computers and big ships we don't think they can sink. The Fitzgerald told us differently, and a few years ago we had a shipwreck right on the Detroit River. And then when the Wescott went down we lost two sailors there. So shipwrecks are still happening -- despite all the technology-- it's still sailing.
• [00:52:35.10] Another thing we do and this is relatively close by, we partner with the Ford Seahorses diving group in a shipwrecks' festival, which kind of is oxymoronic isn't it? But we do have a shipwrecks' festival, and it's a great daylong program. We've got vendors there that will sale you anything from a diving trip in Tobago to the gear that you need to go looking for one of these ships that we're talking about here. They have a whole series of people who come in and give talks and lectures and show films, which actually we're going to step to right next, and it's a it's a great thing that's happening. It's the end of February, February 27th, and it takes place down at the Washtenaw Community College, so really is right around the corner, and it's real reasonable I think. There's gotta be...yeah, it's on a Saturday and if you're interested I'd be happy to give you some more information. There's a gentleman back there name Daryl Wright. Daryl's got the blue hat and he'd be happy to talk to about it too, because Daryl does this kind of stuff for a living. And I appreciate him sitting through this because he probably knows more about it than I do.
• [00:53:43.28] We're going to go to a video next and this video was taken on a dive to a ship calld the Dunderberg, and the Dunderberg is just off the thumb up in Lake Huron. This film was shot by a friend of mine named Tony Gramer. Tony has been diving for years and years and years. He was one of the guys who brought up some of the stuff that's in our exhibit, back in the old days when you bring up stuff. And we've got a real nice wheel that came up from the Ebar Ward and an oil pump from the Eber Ward that Tony has lent us for the exhibit. Tony does some great underwater photography and in diving on the Dunderberg, he had a lot of fun doing this one. When he'd just stepped into high--definition filming, I'm not sure I was going to translate here, but it's really nice film.
• [00:54:32.70] The Dunderberg was a typical Great Lakes collision. Whether it's the picture it's the rock or the rock hits the picture, it was bad for the picture and the Dunderberg happen to be the picture. It got run into late at night by a passenger packet, much bigger boat, sank very rapidly, and sits on the bottom in pretty darn good shape. Most unusual part about the Dunderberg, and you'll see it almost right off the bat, is the figure head that it's got. Most Great Lakes boats oddly enough did not have figure heads.
• [00:55:07.25] I know a guy whose trying to do a paper on it, and he's found very very few Great Lake ships that had it. Because they were utilitarian; they were good for 5 or 10 years -- 7 years if you're lucky -- and then they were gone. You'd trashed them; you'd pull them into a harbor and you walked away, so that they didn't dress them up very much. And the Dunderberg actually has a very spectacular figure head, which the zebra mussels and the scale have gotten to a little bit; you can't see it so well. But this will give you an idea of what it's like when you dive, and I'm not a diver; I should have prefaced the whole thing by saying that. I'm sailer, so I'm really partial to staying on top of the water.
• [00:55:45.39] [LAUGHTER]
• [00:55:47.55] Divers get to see a whole different world and this is where Tony's living, and these guys are just on the way out. It was out near the freighter channel, so they're diving out where the boats you still running today. [MUSIC] Mandatory new-age music. They did this for about 3 days and they didn't tell Tony they were blowing bubbles; he thought his boat was going nuts, but here they are going in. [MUSIC CONTINUES] This is what she looks like on the bottom.
• [00:56:51.03] That's Robert McGreevy's [? season. ?] Robert McGreevy -- I don't know if you're familiar with his work - he's worked with the folks up at Thunder Bay, he's with the folks up at White [? Creek ?] Point; he's very talented in this kind of thing. But you can see where it got run into at the side and we'll see that in about three minutes. This kinda shows what we're going to see at the front, the cat's heads the bowsprit -- here's the bowsprit. There are some shots filtered through here that Tony took about 18 years ago, before the zebra mussels came in. So you'll see the very clean shots and then youll see the restorative shots.
• [00:57:54.21] There's the bowsprit or rather the other figure head, shaped like an allegator which nobody's been able to explain. It must be an allegator [UNINTELLIGIBLE] But you can see the zebra mussels have covered the chains there, and there's a beautiful carving down the side of this as it wraps around on the prow or where it use to be; slowly scaling over, slowly deteriorating. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] You can see the stock and the anchor off to the left. The anchor rope is tide off to the knight's head there. You can see one of the gaff booms off to the right. And then that would have been one of the mast steps there in the center. A [? fight ?] [? for ?] [? reel ?] is one of things he's going to show you; pre-zebra mussels Here we go; the zebra mussels in sight. So you can imagine in another 10 years, I'm hardly going to make out the shape of it.
• [01:00:10.71] That probably is a torch and a torch holder. The very round knob at the top would have been soaked in pitch; would have been burning at night when they got hit. Just the other side of what I'm thinking is the top mast is the capstan, which is, for all you sailors essentially a big winch. That looks like the bilge pump right before the [? after-pipe ?] rail. The main, I guess, is a three-masted. You can still see the knots on the mast, and they just took tree and shaved it and stuck it in there. I think this is where he heads over to the gash in the side.
• [01:02:06.66] That would have been the gangway. And all of a sudden the rail ends. Kind of hit it at an oblique angle there and you can kind of see how it pushed the timers in. Pretty big hole for letting water in. Dive [UNINTELLIGIBLE] coming up. Beautiful picture of the light in the back. You can see what the zebra mussels are doing, so we really haven to get down and do these. I think that's probably all we need to see. If you like to see more this or any of Tony's shipwrecks, let me know I'll give you this number. Tony Gramer does beautiful work. So, this is the point where we go to questions and answers.
• [01:04:33.48] [SPEAKER 1:] I know the Edmund Fitzgerald. We read the book before. It hit the... like there's the one, there's
• [01:04:45.24] MR. STONE: Hit the shoal ? Huh? OK, that's theory number one.
• [01:04:52.70] [SPEAKER 2:] Theory number two. The Edmund Fitzgerald was in a storm that caused a bit of waves that could have tipped the ship sideways so that the waves got higher than the deck. They recovered the bell from the bottom of the sea.
• [01:05:13.13] MR. STONE: They did recover the bell didn't they?
• [01:05:20.06] [SPEAKER 2:] If they would've recovered it, it would snapped of the ship.
• [01:05:22.40] MR. STONE: But it didn't snap off the ship until they went down with that big diving suit and got it, right? Have you seen the bell?
• [01:05:29.45] [SPEAKER 2:] Well, no. [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
• [01:05:30.01] MR. STONE: You guys will have to do that trip sometime, yeah. Of course Edmund Fitzgerald. everybody says well how did the Fitzgerald go down? And there's at least 8 or 9 very very solid theories and I'd say it's three of them; take your pick. Somebody came up with a new one last year. One of the architects who's still around had a theory that he was busy depositing himself. Anyone else like the step to the mike? Don't be shy.
• [01:06:11.19] [SPEAKER 3:] During the first Gulf War, Marinette Marine, which is where they raised Alvin Clark was building mine sweepers and tested them out on the bay, Green Bay, and I'm told that withe the very sophisticated sonar on there that they mapped every shipwreck on Green Bay -- it was locked away.
• [01:06:33.41] MR. STONE: I wouldn't be surprised.
• [01:06:36.60] SPEAKER 3: Did you hear anything about that?
• [01:06:37.88] MR. STONE: I haven't heard about that one, no, but I was doing some research into the Detroit River wrecks and the St. Clair River wrecks, and there are several, but there isn't much left of them. In the Detroit River if a wreck went down they easily recovered if it was any way salvageable, or they couldn't salvage it did they blew it up. So, I didn't think there was much left. But I talked to a guy who works for the Core of Engineers and they have done the same thing. As they've been going up looking for dead cars and whatever else falls into the river, they have discovered several wrecks that I didn't know were there. Another way to find wrecks---not to get away for your question, I don't know about the Green Bay surveys. I can give you the name of a guy though; Brandon Baillod would be able to tell you the second. He's a probably one of the premier Wisconsin wreckdivers, and he also does the website, and he also writes the papers. And he's a real historian. But if you're interested looking for wrecks a relatively shallow water, Google Earth is a wonderful tool. If you get the right lighting, there's some just up in St. Clair River, kind of just near Algonac and just near the Harrison's Island cut-off. You can actually zoom in and see the wreck sitting in the shallow water, which for us -- guys who don't like going under water -- is great fun.
• [01:07:58.07] SPEAKER 3: Then last summer I was sailing my little sailboat off Menominee and between the lighthouse and marina entrance, it was about a couple hundred yards off what they call Fat Lady's Beach in about 30 feet of water, there's a wreck there that people were diving on. And I don't know anything about it. I was wondering if you...
• [01:08:18.59] MR. STONE: Nope. We say there's is about 4,700 and probably a good day 1,015 have been found, but I couldn't tell you which one that was. One guy had a great time up in Lake Superior. He was going out on White Fish Bay, and he had an idea of where a schooner was. And he went out--this was not this last summer but the summer before--and he went out and he was driving along, because the water was low, he actually found it without getting out of his boat. He was close enough that he was able to see it. So, he got all the coordinates, the weather was getting a little rough so he headed back to go out the next day and on his way out the next day, he passed over a second wreck that he could just see. That was a bonus day. I talked to him the day after. He hadn't come down; he was still up here somewhere.
• [01:09:09.11] SPEAKER 4: I've got a question. On your map where you showed the area sanctuaries where lots of wrecks have happened that have been designated; I don't know if that's the right term for it. [UNINTELLIGIBLE] there was one in lower Western Michigan--I'm from the Muskogean area it looks like just below that.
• [01:09:25.45] MR. STONE: Muskogean down by St. Joe.
• [01:09:26.64] SPEAKER 4: Yeah and I was not aware of that, I'm just curious. What?
• [01:09:30.39] MR. STONE: West Winds.
• [01:09:31.56] SPEAKER 4: West Winds, yeah. What would have caused it approximately? Did they know how many wrecks were there?
• [01:09:36.74] MR. STONE: Off the top my head I don't know. I think that they've identified about 20, because they're fairly long, and they're relatively shallow too, which is nice. There was a lot of traffic down there between south of Lettington. Anything Lettington you just march down the way. And it was lots of traffic and a real hard west blow -- northwest, southwestern, didn't matter, they end up on the beach or some place in that vicinity. Lots of wrecks in that area. And Commerce, OK West Winds and Commerce. Oh yeah, the Manitou and that's designated, and I think the most recent one is the Traverse City right up in Grand Traverse Bay has just been dedicated.
• [01:10:20.99] [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
• [01:10:21.28] MR. STONE: Oh sure. Well some of that was getting out of the wind. These both that head for the leigh of an island, like up near Manistique or the Maintou Passage or some place in there. And they were already in trouble. They were already in a full gail or they were probably already taking on water. They're probably dragging an anchor, and they tried to look for some leigh to get under the leight of the islands, under the leigh of Grand Travers Bay, and then they sunk. So why a lot of that is. Yes ma'am.
• [01:11:01.30] SPEAKER 5: I have to admit that I do not know a lot about zebra mussels othere than the devastation that they cause, but I was noticing on the film, when he was filming the mast and all around the base of it you could see them, but as he got up higher they weren't there.
• [01:11:21.06] MR. STONE: I think, and this is just a guess, I think that's because it was a pine mast, and I don't think there was much for them to hang on to. It was very slippery, there was nothing really for them to grab, whereas on some of the other woods -- especially the flat surfaces, they had something to grab. I know that there are some metals that they won't go for; they won't adhere to that because there' some chemical action there. And I will say that we talk about the devastation. In fact it's been tremendous. Any time something like that comes into our ecosystem it's a real problem. But I'll also say that I've been sailing since I was 10, and I can see the bottom of harbors that I could never see ever before. The lakes are incredibly clean, which has made it really good for pikes and walleyes and stuff that are looking for fish, they're finding it. The predators are doing a wonderful job. They're kind of actually having a problem there because they're wiping out their food chain. It's so much cleaner.
• [01:12:20.38] SPEAKER 5: So, if you were to able to go down and scrape off the zebra mussels, do they totally destroy what's underneath so there really is nothing other than this group of mussels, or is there still something underneath there. MR. STONE: First of all, they're pretty tenacious little rascals even after they're dead, and it's real hard to get them off. But when you do get them off they leave a very small footprint on the wood itself. We had a barrel that was brought up. The police divers found it and brought it to us 2 years ago. and it took one of those teflon kitchen scrapers so that it wouldn't hurt the wood. And I was able to get most of them off, so they will come off and once you do get them off you can almost get a perfect peace -- you'll see a little pit. It's kind of like an acne thing--once it goes away it's just a little touch left.
• [01:13:17.22] SPEAKER 5: So, if a shipped were to go down tomorrow in the Great Lakes and we wanted to preserve it, is there something that you can do to it or put on it or something that would prevent that?
• [01:13:30.99] MR. STONE: Nope. Nothing we've figured out yet. I can't imagine something that wouldn't have harmful effects on the other side; the equal and opposite reaction -- the thing you don't expect. So no, it's just kind of there. So the trick is get there as quickly as possible and get surveys done, get the photographs done, so we've got it down the road. And who knows in 20 years something may come along, a little virus or something that kills all those zebra mussels, and then we won't have that problem anymore.
• [01:13:58.65] SPEAKER 5: It'll just do something else though, so, thank you.
• [01:14:00.89] MR. STONE: That's right, sure. The asian carp!
• [01:14:05.95] [LAUGHTER]
• [01:14:06.54] MR. STONE: Wouldn't that be too good, yeah Daryl
• [01:14:09.01] [LAUGHTER]
• [01:14:14.15] MR. STONE: We waited for 15 years and now it's a problem. I should have moved on that one quicker.
• [01:14:19.49] DARYL: Good evening my name is Daryl Wright. I live out here in Dexture, and I found out about this little session here this evening out of the Ann Arbor news yesterday. And I scrambled as quickly as I could to try to put a few things together. I'm hoping we can help answer some other questions here. I do have some material that I brought that I ran through the copy machine quickly today, and everybody here should be able to get a copy of that.
• [01:14:49.93] First item I have on my hand here for the divers and anybody who is interested. There is a publication it's called A Diverse Guide to Michigan's Underwater Preserves. It has all of the preserves and the shipwrecks and so forth, that are noted. The way to see one of these is if you come to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Festival which will be at Washtenaw Community College on Saturday, February the 27th. And the brochures or the pieces of paper I'm going to pass out have that flyer on there, so that you'll be able to look at this and schedule it. The sheets underneath -- I Deal with Underwater Search Video -- and the vessel that you saw on the screen here with the divers going off it, trust me that is humongous compared to mine. I've got an 18 footer, and we concentrate with cameras only. I do a little sonaring but not much. I'm planning on having to booths myself at the shipwreck festival, and I have a website that you can visit. This is not a business. I am retired. I just having a good time out here. I covered Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, Lake Superior. Come see me at the booth. Looked at some of the equipment that we use. Everything that we use for the right view is designed and built by myself. I blow bubbles once in awhile; been blowing bubbles since the 60's, but there are some places I don't go. I am not a tech diver; I'm not going to the deeper depths. There is one other pass out that will also be available at the Great Lakes Shipwrecks Festival and that's the one for the sanctuary at Alpena. That is the 13th National Sanctuary. It is the only santuary in the United States that is devoted to shipwrecks. No cost for admission. The government -- our tax dollars -- has spent millions on this place and it's a little off the beaten path, but it is one heck of a place to go.
• [01:16:59.75] MR. STONE: How can you say that, it's in Alpena.
• [01:17:01.56] [LAUGHTER]
• [01:17:01.76] MR. STONE: So, you wanted to learn more about this Daryl is going to be hanging out in back and he will be happy to hand you whatever information you're interested in. Come by they shipwreck festival if you're interested in that kind of thing. And of course I'd love to say come on by and see us at the Dossin Museum. Thanks a lot.
• [01:17:19.40] DARYL: One thing I'll ask, please, one past out to each family. Everything I do is out of my own pockets. There's no funding here; it's all volunteers that make this come to be.
• [01:17:30.10] MR. STONE: Thanks.
• [01:17:31.51] DARYL: Thank you.