Early one summer evening, as his boat, the Len-Der, cruises out from Milwaukee Harbor into the open waters of Lake Michigan, captain and divemaster Jerry Guyer can’t resist commenting on the color of the lake.
“Look at that water. People have no idea how beautiful the water is. It’s as blue as the Caribbean,” he says.
Out here, several miles from shore, the city skyline is minimized by the swelling world of water surrounding the small boat, its 12 human occupants, and its cargo of scuba tanks, regulators, flippers, wetsuits, and drysuits. On this particular midsummer trip, eight people will take the plunge into cold Lake Michigan waters, descending 72 feet to explore and measure a sunken Milwaukee fireboat scuttled in 1923. Of those who remain on deck, two are Guyer’s crew, expertly assisting the divers in and out of the water. One is this writer, recording a snapshot of their expedition—and also, embarrassingly, vomiting over the starboard side into three-foot swells the others don’t seem to mind. One is Guyer, with steady sea legs and trademark white beard, who’s been diving Wisconsin waters for 44 years and has run Len-Der Charters and Pirates Cove Diving for 30 years.
• • •
Shipwrecks are Guyer’s passion. He fell in love with the allure of unknown treasures at the bottom of the sea in 1964, when he was in high school. A friend was taking scuba lessons, and soon Guyer did, too. He caught the diving bug and never looked back. Unlike many divers, who prefer warmer, saltier waters, Guyer is happiest diving right here in Lake Michigan. The cold doesn’t faze him—and the novelty of being one of very few humans to actually see shipwrecks, mangled and silent in their freshwater graves, is what makes him tick.
“Diving [on a shipwreck] is very interesting,” he says, “a piece of history frozen in time from the day it sank. You have to use your imagination a little. Running through your mind are all the people who worked on it, all the people who died.”
After retiring in 2002 as an industrial education teacher at Milwaukee’s Pulaski High School, he was free to devote himself to the addictive avocation of searching for undiscovered shipwrecks. He scans for “targets” on which to dive, because it’s the thrill of finding wrecks that excites him. Using a high-resolution Marine Sonic side scan sonar unit—a device towed behind his boat that emits sonar signals and receives those bounced back from the lakebed—Guyer canvasses Lake Michigan’s bottom for anything that might indicate a wreck.
“In all honesty, there’s not a lot of people who look,” he explains. “There’s a lot of people who talk about looking. And there are a lot of people who have the equipment and have looked once or twice. But unless you’re looking 100 days a year, you’re not going to have much [luck].”
These days Guyer enjoys getting around on one of his “diver propulsion devices,” a kind of underwater scooter with a waterproof electric motor powered by a storage battery that pulls a diver along. He explains that an unaided diver can swim about a block underwater; with a scooter, he says, he can travel up to a mile.
Through his charter dive business, Guyer shares his passion for wrecks with other divers, taking them out on the Len-Der to tour popular Lake Michigan wrecks like the Prins Willem V or the car ferry Milwaukee. His boat was named for Leonard Derse, a customer who was diagnosed with cancer shortly before Guyer bought the boat, and who soon after passed away. Like most of his longtime customers, Derse became a friend.
When he’s not diving or scanning for wrecks, Guyer is a veritable marine jack-of-all-trades. He’s the backup captain for the University of Wisconsin’s Great Lakes WATER Institute’s research vessel, the Neeskay. He’s scoured the bottoms of tugboats and cleaned logs out of the high-speed Lake Express ferry’s intakes at two in the morning. In his own mini editing studio, he’s made a couple of 30-minute films using underwater footage. He’s helped with the National Geographic Society’s JASON Project, which connects students with real-world explorers. Police and fire departments have consulted with Guyer to search for missing bodies—last year he found the Cessna that crashed in Lake Michigan while transporting organs for transplant from Michigan to Wisconsin. And he’s gotten into the salvage business, something that happened, he says, because nobody else was doing it.
Last summer, Guyer also ferried volunteer underwater archaeologists to one of the wrecks he’d found in 2005, which is probably Milwaukee’s Fireboat #23. At a time in history when the Milwaukee River was a commercial corridor, fireboats were an important part of fighting urban fires. Originally named the August F. Janssen, #23 was built in Sturgeon Bay in 1896 and entered service with the Milwaukee Fire Department in 1897. Named for MFD’s Engine Company 23, which operated the vessel, the 1,000-foot-long boat served Milwaukee well, using her 4,500-gallon-per-minute water pump to extinguish fires at buildings, grain elevators, and commercial vessels along the waterfront. Historical records show that #23’s machinery and pumps were sold for junk in 1922. On July 27, 1923, she was scuttled—deliberately sunk—in Lake Michigan, a few miles from Milwaukee, where she lay forgotten until Guyer rediscovered her eighty-two years later.
Because the city scuttled two fireboats of about the same length, this wreck could be Fireboat #17, says Guyer. But he doesn’t think it’s likely. He points to records he’s procured that show that #17 had its engine on board when it was scuttled. The boat on the lake bottom has no engine.
Last year, the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association (WUAA) got interested in doing an underwater archaeological survey of #23. The survey entails detailed recordkeeping of the wreck—measuring, mapping, photographing, filming, and documenting what the Wisconsin Historical Society considers a “submerged cultural resource.” The goal of the survey, which will continue this summer, is to make information about the wreck accessible to the public.
Kimm Stabelfeldt, director and treasurer of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Foundation, organized the WUAA volunteer divers who worked on sur veying the wreck. Guyer offered the Len-Der to take volunteers to dive on #23 every Thursday night last summer, weather permitting. And so—they dove.
• • •
Stabelfeldt, a man who doesn’t believe in Dramamine, has been diving for 35 years and doing underwater archaeology for 15. In earlier dives he’s photographed and filmed #23. Tonight he's assigned himself the task of measuring the boiler with Marshall Lokken of Wisconsin Rapids.
“I told Kimm I would hold the dumb end of the tape measure,” jokes Lokken, referring to the handle.
The divers suit up and splash off the Len-Der’s stern into the 49-degree water in pairs every five minutes. Beneath the rolling waves, the lake becomes a three-dimensional world. The divers follow the yellow mooring line—the only thing that tethers them to the surface into freshwater depths clarified by the filter feeding of invasive quagga and zebra mussels. Saltwater corrodes metal and eats through hulls, but cold freshwater helps preserve wrecks. So #23, sprawled on the lakebed, is a spectacular sight.
Stabelfeldt and crew use mechanical pencils to write underwater measurements on Mylar slates, which they tote in bright yellow mesh bags like casual shoppers from an alien biosphere. Stabelfeldt and Lokken measure the boiler at 19.6 feet by 9.4 feet. Kastella gets a bit turned around, initially mistaking bow and stern. This is the first survey dive on #23 for some of the volunteers, and their overall mission tonight is to familiarize themselves with the site. Ewing and Perea see what they describe as portholes, and Perea is excited to see the water gun, last used more than 85 years ago. The divers hear—or is it feel?—the whine of the Lake Express as it passes by somewhere overhead.
After 20 minutes, each pair returns to the surface, joy on wet faces creased red by scuba masks, meeting a meticulous Guyer, who notes how much gas remains in their tanks—and then makes sure they feel welcome to partake of the communal Oreos. The dives are a too-brief sojourn into a realm foreign to the human body.
• • •
One wreck thought to have sunk in the Milwaukee area has eluded him for 20 years: the 90-foot Ashtabula, a small general-cargo schooner that sank in 1883. “It had 30 to 40 tons of sundries, household glassware, tableware, tools, which is kind of novel,” says Guyer. “It’s like stepping back in history to see those things.”
He recently bought another boat, the Fathom, which he docks in Gills Rock, Door County. He plans to use it to scour the bottom of Green Bay for shipwrecks. What he’s really after is the very first known shipwreck in Lake Michigan, the Griffon—the holy grail of Lake Michigan shipwrecks.
“In 1679, long before Wisconsin was a state, La Salle’s ship Griffon was last seen leaving Green Bay,” says Tamara Thomsen, underwater archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society; she’s referring to French explorer and shipbuilder Rene-Robert Sieur de La Salle. “She never made it past the Straits of Mackinac. It’s impossible to say if she’s lost in Wisconsin waters, because she has yet to be found.”
Guyer figures he has a decent shot of finding the Griffon if she sank in Green Bay, because he will be one of very few searching.
As he contemplates the centuries of shipping by the French, Norwegians, and others in and out of Green Bay, Guyer is excited about the prospects of future discoveries on and under Lake Michigan. “Even if only one [ship sunk] a year,” he says, “that’s hundreds of years.”
3 Questions For . . .
Tamara Thomsen, an underwater archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society:
Q: How many people have died in Great Lakes shipwrecks?
A: More than 30,000.
Q: What's the most valuable cargo that ever went down?
A: Iron ore—or people. There is no lost treasure in Wisconsin.
Q: How long are wreck materials preserved?
A: The cold freshwater preserves shipwrecks indefinitely. We have ships that went down well over 150 years ago where you can still see paint on the hull.
3 Shipwrecks
Lady Elgin
Built: 1851
Stats: 231 feet, 819 tons
Casualties: 103 survivors, 297 deaths
Sank: Sept. 7, 1860
Location: Lake Michigan, near Winnetka, Ill.
Story: Nearly 300 people—many of them Irish passengers from Milwaukee’s Third Ward—died when this side-wheeled passenger steamer sank. The schooner Augusta collided with the Lady Elgin at night as she was returning to Milwaukee from Chicago, ferrying the Irish Union Guard. Litigation followed its rediscovery in 1989.
Appomattox
Built: 1896
Stats: 319 feet, 2,082 tons
Casualties: No deaths
Sank: Nov. 2, 1905
Location: Lake Michigan, 150 yards from North Point, 20 feet down
Story: The second-largest wooden steamer on the Great Lakes, the Appomattox ran aground at North Point in the fog and was abandoned Nov. 15, 1905. Today it’s sometimes visible from the surface.
Prins Willem V
Built: 1940
Stats: 258 feet, 1,567 tons
Casualties: 30 survivors, 0 deaths
Sank: Oct. 14, 1954
Location: Lake Michigan, 3.7 miles east of Milwaukee Harbor, 80 feet down
Story: Originally scuttled by the Dutch to thwart the Nazis during World War II, the ship was raised and returned to service in 1949. The day it left Milwaukee for Holland, fully loaded with luxury goods and other items, the barge Sinclair XII, towed by the tug Sinclair Chicago, struck the Prins Willem V. Known in diving circles as “Willie,” the Prins Willem V is probably the most popular wreck for Milwaukee-area divers. Three attempts to raise the ship have failed.
More to Explore
•Each year in March, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Research Foundation holds its annual Ghost Ships Festival in Milwaukee, with films, workshops, and seminars devoted to Great Lakes shipwrecks and maritime history. ghost-ships.org.
•See cool videos at Wisconsin Shipwrecks, a pretty slick website with links for kids and teachers, including a link to the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant site. wisconsinshipwrecks.org.
•Brendon Baillod’s Great Lakes Shipwreck Research portal connects you to resources and groups dedicated to exploring regional shipwrecks. ship-wreck.com/shipwreck/index.jsp.
•Silent Helm Underwater Productions’ collection of haunting underwater images features 21 shipwrecks in southwest Lake Michigan, all photographed, researched, and compiled by Rick Richter. silent-helm.com/images/Shipwrecks/shipwreck_research.htm.
•The impressive Great Lakes Shipwreck File: Total Losses of Great Lakes Ships 1679-1999 was researched, referenced, and compiled by David D. Swayze and lists 500-plus commercial wrecks on the Great Lakes. boatnerd.com/swayze/shipwreck.
•See virtual shipwrecks at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s page about Wisconsin shipwrecks. wisconsinhistory.org/shipwrecks.
•Browse thousands of ship file documents (including some from wrecks) from the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society’s records at the Milwaukee Public Library. The group also puts out a quarterly magazine. wmhs.org.
•The Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association sponsors an annual fall conference; this year’s event is set for October in Milwaukee. The group often looks for volunteers to help survey wrecks. wuaa.org.
When You Go
You have to be a certified diver to see most shipwrecks firsthand, but there are ways to get a closer look. Kayak or snorkel to see shipwrecks in relatively shallow water: the Appomattox off the coast of Shorewood, the Christina Nilsson in Baileys Harbor, the Louisiana at Washington Island’s Schoolhouse Beach, the Noquebay in the Apostle Islands, and the hulls of the Ida Corning, Oak Leaf, and Empire State at Sturgeon Bay’s Bullhead Point City Park.
The Wisconsin Maritime Trails program maintains dry-land historical markers about other wrecks, including the Daniel Lyons at Algoma’s municipal marina, the Frank O’Connor at Baileys Harbor’s Cana Island Lighthouse, the Kate Kelly at Wind Point, the Joys at Sturgeon Bay’s Sunset Park, the Lucerne in Ashland overlooking Chequamegon Bay, the Lumberman in Oak Creek’s Bender Park, the Niagara at Port Washington’s harborfront, the Ocean Wave at Sevastopol’s Whitefish Dunes State Park, and the Vernon in Two Rivers’ Rogers Street Fishing Village. And you can walk through the hull of the Lottie Cooper in Sheboygan’s DeLand Park. The state program also identifies museums and lighthouses whose stories involve shipwrecks in some way.
Michael Timm writes from Cudahy.
Interested in this issue?
Wisconsin Trails is sold at bookstores, grocery stores, and drugstores in Wisconsin. Can't find it? Contact Circulation Manager, Kelly Ivan at kivan@journalsentinel.com or (414) 647-4764.
Or click here for a FREE trial issue!
