Gales of November

foreign [Music] ER with the Detroit Historical Society session right there um I I am an admitted vote nerd uh how many how many bull nerds we got here yeah yeah I'm pretty sure um I get to be the curator for the Detroit Historical Museum the Dawson Great Lakes Museum and a collection of about a quarter million things that we have at the uh an undisclosed location uh private Warehouse the Dawson Great Lakes museum being our Maritime Museum it was the third of the maritime museums on the Great Lakes the first one to be purpose built for that if you get a chance to get down there it's still free uh we just we're in the process of doing a whole new Landscaping project so you're going to see kind of a new outside of the museum we redid the inside about 2013. so it's in pretty great shape in fact I was down there just Sunday night of course November 10th the anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald we like three or four other museums around the Great Lakes do a program on that evening and ours is kind of neat because it's an International Event it's uh it involves well we get Lee Murdock over there anybody who knows Lee's music he puts on a nice shell and then we do a wreath ceremony that involves vessels from all of the government agencies that work on the river so U.S Coast Guard Canadian Coast Guard Port of Detroit Port of Windsor Michigan State Police OPP all of those organizations send somebody with a to our Honor Guard including the Royal Canadian amount of police he loves getting this picture taken and he's very very good about it but they also send vessels and we've got this wonderful flow till it comes down including a helicopter that comes in from the homeland security folks so it's uh it's a real nice grease ceremony we also don't do a historical presentation afterwards we've been doing it for 25 years and and it it kind of brings it home and it was really nice because November 10th oddly enough for us and I should knock on some wood around here someplace so I can find it has been relatively Pleasant weather this year came the day afterwards and it was you know that was kind of our gales of November um I'm going to be talking about the shipwrecks I'm going to we're going to kind of go into the background of the boats that have been lost kind of how many have been lost why what is the weather play into this and some other factors and then from a more positive standpoint what do we learn from these things I mean from a as a historian who studied archeology anthropologists all kinds of people can learn a lot about the Great Lakes from the shipwrecks so well well shipwrecks are a bad thing I'm a sailor I like boats when they're on top of the water okay um shipwrecks still there's something to be taken from them so it's one of my favorite pictures the Truesdale and it's you know it's it's in a gale and it's taken water over the side uh this would have been about 1940 and lots and lots of vessels fly in The Waters at this time there were probably 300 Freighters of this type that were out there today we've only got about 60 that are running they're much different design we'll kind of look at that but I've talked to a lot of guys who used to steer these boats and they run into the stuff they used to run into it all the time you know it wasn't something they looked forward to but many of them have said you know I've been up in front steering and I'll look back and the only thing I see is the Smoke Stack so this is not an unusual picture this is something these yes what's that do you think at that point nope no it's fine they're made the idea is to let the water roll off of them um and and they're made that way but you can only take so much of that I mean this is this is tons of water oh yeah on top of the the tongue so tough on the boats tough on the boats as far as The gales of November you know it's November tough yeah I love it was really tough don't forget October um you know we had some pretty stiff winds there's some great pictures you go to YouTube and look at Duluth at the end of October and they were getting hammered I mean their brake wall was under water and the Coast Guard was going out in the in the Ship Channel and practicing their disaster rescue stuff because this is you know it was pretty tough you know obviously beginning of the year there aren't many boats out so we're not gonna we're gonna discount this and maybe even December um oddly enough or not oddly enough in the spring you get some weather that gets kind of ugly but you know this this happens in October or November and it happens for a pretty good reason um real quickly just a couple of facts you know an incredible amount of water that we've got here an incredible resource that I hope we remember to take care of um you know as far as the the surface area of the Lakes but bigger than that almost 300 000 square miles in the Watershed I mean this is a an incredible ecosystem that we're dealing with 20 of the world's fresh surface water we need to take care of this um they're also different than what Sailors deal with on the ocean when they're Out on the Ocean the wave moment is is in fact much much different you know if there's a big storm um you know the waves may be 30 40 50 feet but they're they're you know usually you know long rise and a long fall whereas on the Great Lakes because waves are designed or by what happens especially under them you know the the deeper the water is the bigger the waves are the shallower it is the shorter the waves are so that they're much quicker in moment and that's our boats are built to take that but it can be really tough real chopping anybody who's been out sailing around a power boat and a storm in the Great Lakes will understand how choppy the wakes can be short proximity a big thing you know Out on the Ocean you get into a storm you turn tail and you run you could run two or three days before you hit something the Great Lakes you turn tail and run you got two or three hours so you these things are all taken into account shallow Harbors there aren't a lot of places to go especially up the east side of Michigan Lake Lake Huron um there's very few places that a boat can go in safely they had to build Harbor Beach just because of that massive Harbor Rivers requiring skill the guys to steer the boats on the Great Lakes is some of the best pilots in the world you know because they're not only dealing with the Detroit River in the Sinclair River and the Saint Mary's River they're dealing with the Calumet if you've ever seen how that snakes through Cleveland or uh of the Cuyahoga through Cleveland or Calumet in Chicago these guys are good the frequent stops in primary cargos really refer to how the sailors get taken care of and fed and they get fed pretty well um you know it sits in the middle of the continent the guys in the loose are really really proud of the fact that they're 2000 miles from technology it's a if if you wind your way through to get to almost the middle of the continent and if you're through Chicago you can match yourself into the Mississippi system it's pretty impressive but this time of year as the weather is changing you know you've got these big Alberta Clippers right here it's coming from Siberia this week you know it's just coming over the poles and and sweeping into the Lakes you've also got this warm air that's warm dry air that can come out of the West and depending on the time of the year the end of the hurricane season you've got this moist warm air coming out of the South very often these things are fighting each other in fact if we talk about the night that happened to the Fitzgerald you know this is basically what happened this stuff all met right there you know it just peeled in together they were three different weather systems that were coming at different speeds and just basically created a cyclone and we'll I'll touch on that a little bit later as far as the what the web um real quickly the vessels that we've had to deal with I throw this up to show the sailing ships of European design and American design and then we get passenger boats bulk carriers and the boat carriers kind of switch over to cell phone loaders but I don't want to forget the canoes you know people have been navigating the Great Lakes for hundreds of years before we started building big European style boats and those guys were in some pretty neat crafts you know this is not something I'd want to take out except on a really quiet day but this is because this is uh this is just off um the arson's island this guy came along and his wife came over from Waffle Island they found vessels like this in Walled Lake I mean these things are around and were important but they weren't the best way to go the better way to go is this you know the Big Bird canoes you could build them just about anywhere if you had the skills you could take them just about anywhere they do two or three inches unless you put and they carry three tons four tons of first these are pretty impressive vessels or you could build them small and if you ran them up on a rock you could fix them pull over there's you know get the get the tire and the spruce and what you need and they beautifully designed boats but you know you get them off a big blow anybody who's been in a canoe in a in a serious wave action it's pretty scary and so I'm sure the thousands of these guys were lost I threw this picture and just to show that end of the day for the guys in the Voyager camps um you know these guys have been paddling for 10 or 12 hours and they're eating a little pemmic and smoking a pipe and going to bed uh first European vessel the Griffin if we're talking shipwrecks you got to start here I think that this is pretty much what it looked like Bob mcgreevy's done a lot of research he just painted this last year I guess earlier this year and you know this is essentially what happened so what did happen first shipwreck of the Great Lakes we send a boat out he leaves from BlackRock sails over in the Green Bay he's got some Furs waiting for him this is uh LaSalle which is the Explorer at this point he's got some Furs waiting for him he's going to make himself rich and since that's going to make him Rich he's sailing off down to this area here to click over to the Mississippi to find the head of the Mississippi he's the guy that named The Falls in Minnesota and then he headed down the Mississippi to find the gulf I mean he's off on a massive trip so he sends his second in command back with the boat and massive storm comes in it disappears and we don't really know what the story is people have found it about every 20 years um you know the latest it first appeared over here it was real convincingly done the archaeologists from France came over that wasn't it found up in the mattitus found in the chenos and Steve Lee bear has been digging at it over in Lake Michigan for a while he sure he's found it nobody else is sure he's found it in fact most people are pretty sure he didn't find it um Bob McGreevy who's done some really serious research recently is pretty sure it's probably over near Saint Helens Island based on Native American accounts of seeing a vessel in distress it was the only one on the lake so it's really hard to confuse it but we'll find stay tuned that that will come up as far as vessels lost we start with the very most simple ones the Betos that were sailed up and down the you know the Lakes smaller lakes rivers this would have been something that would have been around Detroit moving sand moving um you know whatever needed grain and that kind of thing basically a shoe box real easy to build and we know there are some of these on the bottom of Lake Sinclair um the military came in British started building more vessels the welcome was built up at Mackinac but served down in Detroit they did make a replica of it some of you might have seen it up at Mackinac was there for a while it's now moved was moved over to Traverse City and and refurbished but it really wasn't built very well in the first place so it's in pretty bad shape they're going to sinking it off of Mackinac City kind of a zip ties I I fear that's what's going to happen with that and we really didn't get any of the big you know Grand age of sale vessels except the ones that served during the the War of 1812 this would have been down at Malden Amherstburg um and the Americans built the same kind of thing over in Lake Erie they got together they shot each other up and really the great age of sale Went Away really pretty quickly because what we did is adapted vessels like this uh scooter this if I pack up this kind of vessel takes at least 120 men to run all right this kind of vessel takes about five so from a commercial standpoint this can be built pretty easily and manned very easily and nobody's leaving the deck you know those other vessels with the square sails you got to send guys Aloft this could be trouble in bad weather these can mostly be managed from the deck and again small Crews mostly families at one time Tuesday 1880s 1870s there would have been three thousand of these two thousand of these work in The Lakes so anywhere you were you would have seen this these beautiful fluffs of of white out on the lake moving around and of course because of that we've lost many hundreds of them boats like this the big passenger Steamers are the first palace steamer era very lightly built many of these suffered either fires or in this case it was run into by a very small scooter because they were built so light that scooter hit it right about here and pierced it almost halfway through vessel sank very quickly about 180 people died over near Chicago we had built bigger and bigger boats city of Detroit fortunately didn't go down one of its com Patriots the city of Cleveland three had a pretty serious accident um this Baltimore cat and Bessemer 2 I'll bring back but these are the rail car ferries they ran in Lake Michigan they ran on Lake Erie and uh and and several of these big vessels were lost in storms of course the Edmund Fitzgerald a beautiful straight Decker doesn't have a self unloading device nice clean clear deck for loading or an ending or the self unloaders of course the equipment added to get the ore and or stone or whatever you're carrying out of the hull Bradley lost American Spirit fortunately we haven't lost any of the Thousand Footers and I do I kind of threw this in here just to compare the freeboard you know we were looking at first picture of the Truesdale where the the area between the water and the deck was about as much as we've got here you know these things are just huge floating warehouses and you've got almost a story and a half there maybe even two uh between the water so these are pretty safe boats they also carry uh really fancy life-saving gear of course the latest in Technologies as far as weather radar radio all the communications gear you need and they do something that they didn't do in the old days they stay in Harbor if weather is getting bad you know right up through the age of the Fitzgerald those guys were you know Iron Sailors they went out into weather that maybe they shouldn't have you know it was a matter of moving the product keeping it moving These Guys these guys are told the Skippers you know if you think there's bad weather you shouldn't be out there don't go um one of the latest developments is the kind of the articulated tug barge this is the barge there's actually a second vessel a tugboat it's tucked in the back of it they've often repurposed old Freighters pulled the engines out put in a v in the back and then they've got a tug that comes in really efficient whereas a freighter of this type has to carry about 28 or 30 guys as far as in women as far as staff the crews on these can be as low as 15. so that they're saving a lot of money it's also real efficient while you're loading the barge the the tug can pull out and go get refueled if the engine dies you put another tug in the back of it it's really quite an efficient system they're not it's pretty but they certainly works so that's what's down there um if we're talking Gales let's look at a couple of storms you may have heard of a couple of these but there's so many that were devastating starting as early as 30 35 you know we've got 17 ships stranded and nine sunk with all hands we don't know the loss of life the station of 1844 I just did a presentation on this this was a thing on Lake Erie where the wind had been blowing out of the Northeast for four or five days all the water was down at the far end near Monroe and when the wind changed Direction it changed to exactly the opposite direction and blew a hurricane and blew all that water in Monroe back up in the Buffalo flooded Buffalo 22 feet destroying a bunch of vessels 75 people died in town 50 people out on the lake and Canal Boats were scattered a mile Inland these are storms you don't usually hear about in fact we talk we try to find somebody in Buffalo that talked about this and there wasn't anybody I had to do it myself um 150 years ago you know the bad year 138 vessels lost over the course of the year but the storm in November and again we're talking November October November October um you know 97 vessels stranded 35 total losses and these are storms you don't hear about 93 54 lives lost 1905 we're going to touch on 1905 a little bit later 17 stranded 32 men gone storm in 1913 is kind of the big one because 43 vessels were stranded 13 lost but a massive loss of life 244 people in that one storm in November again these are during November a little October here's another November 11th um Armistice Day storm a 1940 Black Friday was a big one I mean there's a bunch of incidents where the weather comes through at the end of the year and gets real ugly Again Bradley Daniel Morrell Edmund Fitzgerald all of that November's time so gales of November is not something that uh Gordon Lightfoot made up um how many shipwrecks easy to say over 3 000 David Swayze if you go to his website I think it's um hosted by the Wisconsin Maritime Museum they host his his database of shipwrecks and he's he's guessing right about there he may have added a couple cents um but you'll also go places and people will say ten thousand which brings about the question what's a shipwreck okay um very first shipwreck on the upper Lakes our first our first uh other than the Griffin our very first Steamboat uh the walk in the water launched in 1818 operated for three years very successfully from BlackRock near Buffalo over to Detroit occasionally up to Mackinac I think once it got to Green Bay left in 19 1821 late October I think and left Buffalo there's the Buffalo Lighthouse one of the first on the lakes and was on its way to Dunkirk up the shore the American shore of Lake Erie boat could do about seven knots ran into a 30 knot wind on its nose 30 that win wins over seven knots it basically blew itself back to Buffalo Captain had dropped the anchors he had three anchors down and he's just dragging him across the sand bottom and finally it kind of just came up on the beach there's a couple of couple of people had recorded this in letters that basically came up and bumped and then bumped harder then bumped one more time and it didn't move and it was this is pretty accurate this is a painting commissioned by a woman uh Marion Palmer who was the wife of Thomas Palmer who's uh the uncle of the guy who donated Palmer Park the Detroit family and Mary had been on the boat and uh in fact she was on the first cruise and she was at the last Cruise she hired the guy who painted this and she also was she got the engineer she and the engineer got off into the boat and went and got the Lighthouse Keeper woke him up said Start the Fire let's go save some people and they were able to get everybody off nobody died they went back in dead got the engines the next year the engines are the most expensive part of the boat the rest of it basically fell apart over the winter and uh so is that a shipwreck you know nobody died most of the equipment was saved does that really count um the metaphor like I said we'd talk about 1905 um they call it the metaphor storm it actually grounded several boats up off of Duluth uh matafe had left to lose sailed out and the skipper decided that this was a bad idea we're not going to make it until he he made it he turned toughest Parts turn in the boat and getting back and if you bended Duluth the ship channel is a concrete wall geez probably probably two boats wide but you only want to go in one boat at a time and so they were coming in with a terrible Stern wind and almost made the entrance at the last minute away picked them up turning sideways slammed him into the walls the boat broken half as it sat there um and the whole town of Palouse is watching as the guys up in front they've got a stove and they're able to keep warm the guys in back as the the stern sunk the the boilers went out they had no way to stay warm and nine guys froze on the back end of the boat as the rest of the city watched um really painful real ugly a lot of people in the loose you know either remember or talk about the metaphor storm but you know next spring they raised the boat they put it back to work here it is rigged up to carry cars for McCarthy you know it's probably a picture taken near Detroit um you know is that a shipwreck so the question is you know does that do they have to be on the bottom and have lost a lot of people can they be just driven up against the walls and Duluth and that counts as a shipwreck if you hear 10 thousand and you can't justify it with Dave Swayze's 4700 that's probably where that lies I mentioned this one the Marquette and Bessemer 2 which sailed between Conneaut and Port Colburn carrying railroad cars and this boat does disappeared in a storm massive vessel Lake Erie storm went down nobody has found it this is a big boat in Lake erie's relatively Shallow Lake now it did sink at the deep end but they've never been able to find this boat and there there's speculation as to why I'll touch on that in a few minutes but you know no survivors here of course if Bradley went down there were two survivors one of the guys is still making the rounds he's uh we were talking about survivors before um hiking on his name right now but he um Amaze Frank Mays Frank survived and he's 93 years old and we had him up for a program last year and Frank says you know I've got my uh I've got my uh all my tickets and everything's all set and you know I'm a clear security no problem um I'm renting a car let me know where I need to be for a 93 year old he's pretty spry and somebody asked me at the end of the presentation do you ever have any regrets about being one of the two survivors said no I know people do that I know I understand it I get it but you know I survived I was lucky and I made every day since then a wonderful day you know that's that's a great thing um the morel went down and they only had one Survivor and he just died about a year and a half ago but he didn't talk about his experiences for 65 years I'm sorry Tilly was 65 and then he kind of came out and started doing oral histories and wrote a book and that kind of thing so very very different very different experiences that people survive these things and then the fits 29 guys no survivors no final messages there's lots of lots of suggestions as to what happened shifting cargo one of the suggestions was there's a there's a spot back here where they used to it was built a built to run coal and they switched it to oil and there's usually a coal hooker back here and they just covered in a quarter inch steel and one of the engineers who had built the boat said it should have been at least a half an inch and I would have made it an inch but I'm not second guessing he just thinks they might have gotten hit with a big wave and it just punched that in and that that contributed I think there's probably oh four dozen boats about Wyatt books out there about why the fish sunk and probably 10 or 12 good reasons why people think it sank and I'd say it was probably three of them you know pick your favorite three reasons because it's not one thing that will think about that baby it's it's going to be a number of them um the story of the fits well documented um you know they left here on November 9th down at Duluth the Arthur Anderson left about the same time out of Two Harbors and they basically sailed up together the the weather was the predictions were not good you know the weather was supposed to be coming out of here so they stayed kind of a little North and instead of cutting South here they stayed up to the North and then they made their turn and they were kind of running before it or at least that's what they hoped was going to happen the winds we talk about cyclonic winds earlier you know here over at standards Rock it's 50 miles out of the Dead West we got 19 miles here at the zoo alone kind of from the the Southwest 44 straight out of the South and 20 coming in from the southeast so really what what's happening at this time is there's there's a cyclone going on and it's stirring things up when wind is what makes waves happen and if you've got these kind of winds and they're fighting each other you're getting into some really confused season probably some very big Seas there was a question especially Catherine McSorley thought that the Fitzgerald was too close to a reef that is right up in here and the Reef's 30 35 feet under water and the boat's only drawing 22 feet but if you're running in 30 foot waves you know you're going down an extra 15 feet lower than you think you are if you're running in 40 foot waves it's an extra 20 feet down and that would have put the fits on top of that if if you had actually done it that would put it on top of that rock and punched a hole in the bottom there isn't any evidence of that of course it's only been people have only been down on the wreck a couple of times um you know they they kept pumping along as as the skipper said you know we're going along like an old shoe but they went into a storm a white squall kind of right around here uh passing snowstorm and when they came out of the snowstorm the Anderson didn't see them anymore that was pretty much the end of it and he couldn't believe make sure he couldn't believe that it vote of that size would have sunk he just figured he lost it somehow and he kept on going to Whitefish Bay and Olympic got down here and you know called the Coast Guard and said has anybody seen the fits and they're saying no they should have been here shouldn't they and he said yeah we you know he explained the story and Coast Guard said can you turn around and go find him there's a recording of this he says he physically you can feel him going my helmets thinking of his Cruise thinking of his boat and he said yeah we'll do it I think that's what we need to do um William Clay Ford was down here too and that's kind of why we celebrate the the things we've got the pilot house and those guys are sitting at dinner they were finishing up dinner at anchor safe and they up anchored and went out to try to find them there were two or three other salt water vessels out there and eventually the Coast Guard sent some folks but you know by then it was too late um so that's you know what happened to the Fitz your best guess I'm sure there's books upstairs you can read that'll add to the end of the fuel so the good side of this is that these things can become tools for people like me divers have been looking for them for a long time in the cold water the Great Lakes is a wonderful way to to say that stuff and they're pretty easy to find sometimes this is down at Indiana Dunes uh wreck of an old Schooner probably 1850s and you're just walking along the beach you're going to find it the high water this year has turned over all kinds of these things the archaeologist State archaeologist who's based out of Alpena has been going out people have been calling him things have been washing up he's been all over the state because these things will will get uncovered in a storm or just you know some some gentle up washing boats have been popping the hulls the the wrecks what's left of a boat have been turning up all over the place they also over the last couple of years the the equipment to find these things has been getting better but sometimes it's just as easy this is over until Memorial a Big Tub Harbor and this is about five or six feet down depending on the water levels you can just kayak over the top of it and see what a scooter looked like see how it was built beautifully preserved shindric sometimes if you're break Searcher you're going to have to go to the library start looking through old newspapers here's one that talks about the collision between the Jack and the Norman and within this lay the clues you probably want it went down opposite Middle Island and it went down in 300 feet of water so that gives you an idea you know opposite Middle Island is probably depending on the geography you know between some one point and another and in 300 feet you go down with your depth finder and you know pretty much where you want to start looking um sometimes you go back to the Diaries uh the the log books this is the log from the uh the vessel that ran into the Lady Elgin the Augusta it's not the same year but it was a little two-masted wood Lumber scooter and sailed from Buffalo around to Wisconsin and back a lot of times it's on Lake Erie I could pretty well point out where the guy writes this down where these coming across a sunken Schooner the Mast heads are sticking above the water and if you know where you know if you know what you're looking for and you basically know where he is you can go out and start to start to look for it charts help a lot especially in shallow water these little football things represent wrecks so you can go look there and this is I mean this is a relatively shallow area if you really wanted to look for those wrecks this is harson's Island Russell's Island arson's Island's right next to it so right in our neighborhood or Google Earth kind of cool you know you can go up and you can find these things on the on the charts and just look at them here's one that we filed this is just off Gross Point Patterson Park and Gross Point Park and you know you can find this and then we went down and Dove on that um it's it's at about six feet of water I can dive that um you know and it it basically has been rubbed off by Ice stuff it's it's the bottom Timbers of the ship but it's kind of cool I mean it's not a quarter mile offshore and if you're interested in going shipwreck hunting you can do it in your own backyard um this is an interesting story The Mystery of the Lockwood Lockwood sank in Lake Erie everybody was saved they knew right where it was the lake survey office and the Coast Guard both went out and put buoys on it they took all the lat lunges back when it went down and about three years ago four years ago a group of guys out of Cleveland Cleveland underwater explorers clue they wanted to go find him and they had all the information they went out they had lat lines and the whole darn thing they went out and looked over and they couldn't find a darn thing and they looked and they looked and they looked and they finally saw something sticking out of the bottom that looked like that but it was the end of the year so they had to they had to call it quits they went back to their research again they were sure it should be there but back the next year with a magnetometer and I think some ground penetrating radar and darn it the boat is there it's just because of the aqueous nature of Lake Erie there are portions of Lake Erie that are quicksand and that boat has just sunk right down into the bottom of the lake and disappeared which I think maybe what happened to the Marquette and Bessemer that we talked about before big boat and they can't find it with the equipment that we've got could be the same thing that happened to the Lockwood so the Technologies are getting better you know in the old days if you wanted to find a shipwreck you got a buddy and you hung a chain and some line over the back and you went back and forth and you hope you snag something and if you snag something then you went down and take a look at it that's kind of that takes some time and some trust um they've now got some wonderfully relatively inexpensive sonar equipment and shoot this picture is probably 15 years old I need to upgrade it because it's all instead of going into this box it's going into your laptop and you can record the whole thing and you know the sonar fish goes down off of a reel that's the same it just plugs into a much more advanced computer system um and you tow it behind you now this would be probably a video camera most of the guys I know that do this uh put a video camera down first but then the sonar just kind of passes right over and you get a nice uh a nice view once you get there you may have an idea where the boat is but usually what happens is you'll sector off a piece of your chart and you'll do what they call cutting cutting the lawn you just go back and forth and back and forth until you find something and this guy probably on the next pass is going to run across that and he'll get what he's been looking for all day or maybe all week or maybe all month maybe all year and this is usually what it looks like or what it used to look like without equipment you know this is the the wreck the guy was looking for this is a wreck the guy may not have been looking for what's that anomaly there um interesting to see you're talking probably 800 feet a thousand feet wide Technology's getting better every year in fact as it gets better when you get a good side scan and I think this is a scooter that's been in a collision that's been in the news lately there's two vessels that people thought were up in the Mackinac Straits and they're finding them now over Skillet delete Brendan balod and I forget the other Jeff's Stadium I think they just found this wreck over in skill of the delete but this this was a side scan done of something similar and you know with something like that you can count the number of hatches you can count how many The Masks are where the masks may have fallen overboard how long the vessel is without anybody going in the water you may actually be able to put a name on this book um so that's that's kind of neat how the technology is taking it not that this guys who like diving will stop at that um the part they're into is you know getting in the boat or getting in the gear and going down underneath and seeing it live um this is the way you used to have to do it uh fairly dangerous occupation um at the time it's gotten a whole lot easier of course scuba gear developed during World War II and then those 60s and 70s it was really quite a fad there were a lot of people that knew it not so many people now which is kind of too bad this person's using just a regular you know single tank scuba thing easy to get to 100 feet pretty easy to get to 150 feet people in that kind of gear can do up to 200 but they better be good and because that was such a that was such a limiting factor divers have been working and working and working to increase that depth and they've now with got what really groups that they call technical diving or gas mixed diving or just the hard stuff these guys actually mix their gases as they go down farther the problem is is you get down farther you have to change the amount of nitrogen and helium and oxygen in your bloodstream or you're going to start doing damage to your beards and so these guys actually have a whole formula where they can go down and they'll adjust they've got computers on their wrists and all these things that they will adjust these things going down and Technical divers can get down to about 500 feet in fact they better the fit so it's 5 30. this is pretty tough to item this is brave stuff I've talked to these guys it gets darker as you go you start getting more and more paranoid the farther you get down so you're looking at your computer every 10 seconds your eyes start wandering in different directions it's you gotta really want to go down there because you're going to take probably a 500 foot dive you probably take 15 minutes to get to the wreck you probably have about 10 minutes on the rack and then you're going to spend two hours decompressing slowly coming up your anchor line you know a few feet at a time so you don't get the best um it's you got to really want to do this stuff and and I know guys that do this it's great I'm glad they do um it certainly is kind of a new frontier people are searching it out people like me who you know 10 or 15 feet is about as deep as we like doing there's other ways of going this is the suit that they used on the Edmund Fitzgerald it's obviously a hard cast suit very very yeah okay no it has motion it's not it's not very flexible but it's got cameras and lights and all the things they needed to cut the Bell off of the Fitzgerald and bring it up and put another belt down there with all the names on it so this is an option this is an expensive option which really goes back to that first hard hat diver I showed you kind of tough I like this one you got enough money a few million bucks you can buy yourself a sub put some beer in the fridge go down look around these these guys can go down to several hundred thousand feet depending on which what you purchase it's not a bad way to go but it's really expensive this kind of thing is not and this is really kind of a lot of fun this is uh remotely operated vehicle rovs and this one's down in the Titanic so it's down a long way and these kind of things are being used all the time the the prices on these have fallen they've got lights they've got cameras some of them actually have arms that you can articulate again they're Tethered to the surface so all the information is coming to people up on the surface who are controlling them nobody's in the water the chances of somebody dying is relatively minimal and the best part is we've all seen in these stem classes grade schools high schools you know kids are making robots you know they get together and fight each other what they're doing in a bunch of places up in Traverse City there's a couple of programs that I know around the Lakes this is what you're building they're building these remotely operated vehicles in class A lot of it out of PVC pipe you know just gluing it together and then of course the computers and stuff for the expensive part but the kids are building these for you know under 100 bucks and going out and and doing their own diving and searching and having fun looking for stuff on the bottom of Grand Traverse Bay it's it's a neat way to go and it's a whole lot less expensive way in the water so that's pretty cool once you've found a wreck you there's there's kind of an obligation uh to document it as quickly as possible now divers have been very careful about handing out the locations of new wrecks that they find they're very protective of these and I can't blame them because sometimes they'll spend 10 20 years looking for certain wrecks and try to identify them when they find them they'd like to have the joy of being the first on the deck being the first to do the searching and being the first to release that to the press and letting people know but doing the documentation is something they don't mind again it doesn't have to necessarily be done um down on the bottom you can do it by sending cameras over and then stitching it together into a photo Minaj there and you know you can get a pretty good idea of what a vessel looks like just using that ROV and putting this stuff together they still do and especially if they're relatively shallow you know regular transects the same way an archaeologist would do a The Village an old village on land they're doing this kind of thing underwater you run a basic Baseline and then start working from there conservation is something we've been really kind of emphasizing with Rex this is up at Alpena anybody been up to the the NOAA facility up in Alpena great facility this is this is actually the lobby out here so when you walk in you're looking into the conservation lab in the old days divers used to bring stuff all the time off the Rex it's what they did it's why they went diving you know bring up some China bring up the the steering wheel you know put something on your mantelings that's in the 60s and 70s that's why you don't and then we realized that when you start moving stuff around or taking stuff off a boat you're ruining an archaeological site and it really becomes a problem and there's been some push and pull in the dive community over 50 years but most of the divers I know today are on board with the science they want to preserve these these artifacts record them they're most of them are photographers now they've got wonderful you know high definition cameras that they take down record stuff as quickly as they can because of certain of course zebra mussels have become a huge problem some of these guys that did photography back in the 70s and 80s they're going back to these wrecks and they're almost unrecognizable there's so many zebra mussels on them coating everything you can you don't see dead eyes you don't see any of the cleats all this stuff has been covered um in fact with steel ships the zebra mussels their excrement is a huge problem doesn't affect the wood vessels as much but the muscles you know they've taken all the stuff and when they let some stuff out it's disintegrating the steel and those vessels especially with the weight of the muscles they're starting to collapse I've talked to some diversity you know we're having problems with that what about sometimes is a problem um things that are brought up or things that were brought up years ago we do try to do conservation on them everything's a little bit different the steel the copper the wood Ceramics are probably the most stable highly underpaid interns do this you know to take at their degrees the reason that we really don't bring stuff up is probably best defined by the story of the Alvin Clark the Alvin Clark John Clark Clark Street in Detroit John Clark at Dry Dock he built this boat to bring salt from Buffalo because he had a fish business and he needed to Salt his fish in Detroit he didn't realize we were sitting on a pile of salt so it was importing salt cold a new Castle had this boat for a while sold it to some folks in Chicago and then they they sold some folks up in Green Bay and it used to run wood supposedly legally from Green Bay down to Chicago and then hopefully bring back a cargo of some kind of Provisions that they can make money on this particular Voyage in 1864 entered the Civil War era they couldn't get a they couldn't get a deadhead cargo so they're coming back empty they figure let's dry out the hold so they got all the hatch covers off they get into Green Bay and not paying attention there's you know hit by a Squall rolls the boat over hatches are open fills the boat sinks in minutes three of The Five Guys on board are lost um the boat goes down nobody really recorded when it went down um header Frank Hoffman actually enter Frank Hoffman's buddies who are fishermen commercial fishermen they just bought a new net they're dragging the net behind the boat the net gets hung up on something Frank knows how to die if he owns a bar and but he learned how to scuba dive we're in Marinette Wisconsin right now um he goes out scuba Dives down to find their net he finds the net attached to the the scooter beautifully intact scooter Master's Still Standing some of the rigging's still there the boat itself looks like it just kind of you know dropped to the bottom having been just sailed and he gets all the scuba guys excited and they all come out and they pump out tons of silt they get cables under it they lift it up there's a picture of it being brought to the surface luckily Marinette was is the home of Marinette Marine so they've got all the barges and cranes and everything they need to bring it up they've taken the Mast out at this point to make it easy they're lifting the boat up they put some pumps in it they pump it out it floats late the day it went down and it just was in spectacular shape in fact I've got a couple of pictures they turned it in they're expecting to make it into a maritime museum the biggest problem was marinette's a long way from anywhere and trying to open a museum wasn't so good but look at the shape that the boat is in I mean this you could almost take the vessel out and sailing the way it was and this is recognized here's Howard Chappelle from the Smithsonian kind of the dean of Maritime historians and he said you know this is a great treasure this is more important than any treasure ship any Spanish Galleon we're able to look at the way people lived back then how they built their boats how they put their you know kit together to go out sailing what they were eating what they were eating with just a wonderful treasure the biggest problem was Frank spent all his money getting the boat out of the water triple mortgaged the bar and unfortunately if you pull a boat up it starts to go to rot and there was no way they hadn't figured out how to preserve it this is back in the 70s late 70s you know they over in uh I think it was Norway they found out that uh Vikings ship and they had brought it up and they you know had built a building and they were spraying it to keep it wet until they figured out what to do Frank didn't have that option and so little by little he got kicked out of one yard and kicked out of another yard and the boat just broke in half and you know he's being chased by the Banks for money and in fact in the middle of the night he called a former curator at the Dawson and said you know John you got a truck yeah you come tomorrow yeah John Paul said drove over there with a van and loaded as much stuff as he could get in in the dark of night with his license plate covered you know and he snuck it back to Detroit and I didn't know he had it it was set during the boxes for 25 years I told John retired and we got him back to tell us what was there and I said John what are all these boxes he said that's the last of the elbow Clark because really the the Frank moved to Florida broken man he tried to burn the boat just to get rid of it and then when the fire department showed up he held him off with a shotgun and these are his friends I mean they're not a big town he knows all these guys they talked him down but he was a Broken Man it really it busted him went to Florida and died there and the boat fell apart this is this is where that beautiful Captain was there's the Capstone right there the boat just collapsed they ended up bulldozing it into in the dump trucks so what do you think happened they passed laws laws got passed and said you leave this stuff on the bottom uh Ronald Reagan's side the bottomlands act and all of the states passed laws and said you know you you leave a boat on the bottom hey you leave everything on and on the bottom so while this was a horrible tragedy for the Alvin Clark for Frank Hoffman it really really changed the way we looked at our bottomlands and our shipwrecks and now we're kind of leading the way as far as Michigan in particular Leading The Way of this kind of preservation Michigan's got 15 underwater preserves in fact this one I need to read the rod it comes up to about here this is the Alpena Thunder Bay preserve and there's some great stuff being done and some of these are real accessible over along here they've done a wonderful thing where they've got kind of a shipwreck tour you can do in a kayak you know these are wrecks that are 10 or 15 feet underwater you can see them real easily um you know up here a little less a little less accessible uh but certainly this is these are we're kind of leading the way Ohio is going to get one over by the Erie islands and the uh the people who own the property along the shoreline got scared off and they they nullified it um they're trying to get one over here in Pennsylvania trying to get one in this area and the folks in Wisconsin are trying to get one up in this area here and I think they're going to be successful they were almost there and then political wins changed and then they weren't there at all and then political wins have changed again and now I think they may they may get it so this is the kind of thing they're doing uh we're also a new approach to education this is a wonderful program run the pride of Michigan run out of uh Mount Clemens there are a couple of sea scout boats in the in the Detroit area there's one in Port Huron uh the gray fox so these guys actually these guys actually bring the young Cadets as part of the the Navy Sea Cadet program they bring them in and they not only teach them how to yes or no sir they're really really good at that but how to drive the boat when they when this boat once this boat leaves the dock the the teenagers are in charge of it you know there's a captain on board and there's you know a mate and an engineer but the youngsters are in charge of the boat and they're off to do some really cool stuff they teach them to dive and then they teach them archeology and then they teach them one knowledge and bethematry these guys have found animal which sinkholes off Alpena they've been searching waterfalls Under The Straits of Mackinac they've been looking at Elk herding um middle of Lake Huron used to be above water and the way they captured elk was the same way we captured Mustangs out west you know they kind of drove them into they put they did it with Boulders Elks don't like stepping these people found those walls these kids are finding this stuff they're now they're working with adults who do that sort of thing uh yeah Woods Hole Michigan State University of Michigan the Scripps oceanographic Institute will rent this boat and they'll go out and do some of these surveys and it's uh it's a really wonderful program not only because it's doing great archeology but it's teaching another generation of people to do this and in their spare time they go looking at shipwrecks they have fun doing that um the Dodson Museum we support Great Lakes history in all the possible way we can besides you know putting in wonderful exhibits about this kind of stuff yeah when you were talking about the Fitzgerald syndrome my wife and I were at Dawson's when the captain was still alive Don Ericson Ford yep you spoke to him he actually autographed something for us oh that's good I still have it I forgot Don Erickson was the name or something was the skipper of the the uh William Clay Ford in fact I think I've got a picture here a couple the William Clay Ford's pilot houses on there and Don Erickson who was the skipper of the night defense went down and took the boat out into the storm um would come down and sit in his Pilot's chair his captain's chair and talk to people yeah and there's actually a really wonderful YouTuber video if you if you uh you know you can probably search for Anderson or uh William Clay Ford or Dawson Museum or Great Lakes Maritime Institute we're all kind of involved in that um and we've got the the Fitzgerald anchor this is an accurate lost in the Fairway uh just west of Belle Isle it's a place where ships can drop anchor and wait out a storm or something like that in this case it was going downbound um and it was late in the season and the Coast Guard had pulled all the buoys and the skipper just didn't feel like navigating at night without the buoys so he just turned and dropped anchor and when they brought up the anger when they brought up the anchor chain the next day they mastered link had broken and the the bottom after the fence was lost some diver friends of ours and some people who owned barges and cranes and stuff helped us go out and find it and raise it up and and you know restore it and get it in place and in fact with our new Landscaping project it's moving this is kind of off to the side where you couldn't really see it very well we've moved it over where it's just to be visible from the road a lot more accessible so that's the kind of thing we do now just wrapping up with a couple of fun stories if you'll pardon me we got a call um a few now it was 2000 2011. um that the police divers who do their training in the river uh tough gig you know they're basically visibility can maybe anywhere from six feet to nothing and they're down there trying to find stuff and they they there's a particular Reef right in this area here called chicken bone reef and there's a number of suggestions as to why it's called that but they they did Dove there for many years and they found um five British cans that were down there and the idea I think was the the fort the Old Fort used to sit here and there was a little road off the bluff and we think they dragged them out there in the the winter as as the Americans are coming in in 1796 uh the British are moving down to Malden um at Fort Amherstburg and they just they've got these old four Pounders that don't work anymore British may have done the British army doesn't want them anymore they're going to three six nine and twelves and this four was kind of anomalous besides they were used in the Napoleonic Wars on the on the continent they came over here for the Revolutionary War by the time they got to Detroit they were blown out they were shot they were made they could make big noise air Indian but that was about as much as they could do um so they just decided instead of letting the Americans have them let's just drop them in the river they pulled them out on the ice we're guessing based on kind of how they ended up on the bottom um and it really doesn't look like this okay it looks more like that um they found a sixth one this is kind of fun uh the first one I was involved with and here's the barrel you know again recovered in zebra and quagga mussels but this is kind of a cool thing and the the police department guys took just took charge of it um they did some you know bottom scanning so I could see from uh the scan exactly where it was sitting this is good archeology you know they got the the compass points and did some basic measurements so I knew what they were bringing up um and then they they had a blast they they look at all the TV cameras that are lined up along here this was worldwide they went down they wrapped it up they you know for the first time in 200 years this Cannon's breaking breaking the water 225 years and getting fresh air and you know this is uh this is a real good day for these guys these guys on a good day are looking for cars on a bad day or looking for guns or something else um and so this was kind of nice for them to get some good publicity for and we cleaned it up we took it back we were able to identify kind of the Vintage of it this is uh you can't hardly see it but it's a George Regis um and they got a two in there there's a couple of Roman numerals which is George II which helped us narrow down the timeline um we the first thing we did was put it in the water so it didn't start rotting so we got it submerged we did some research and there aren't many freshwater cannons a lot of salt water cannon only one other freshwater Cannon a lot of the Great Lakes that we were able to find you know chemical Baseline I'm learning a lot about chemistry at this point um did some sample testing to find a plan got a budget had to find some money found some sources and we preserved the darn thing and what was really cool we did get it on display at the end and one of the one of the really fun Parts was Cranbrook was doing a shipwreck exhibit at the time and they borrowed it and about they set up and helped us do the electrolysis which is to pull the salts out of the iron which over time that would be destroying it and they pull it out every couple of weeks you'd have to pull it out to change the water and when they did that they'd bring the cannon over and set it on some you know gym mats and give kids a bunch of toothbrushes and let them be archaeologists it was a blast and the good part was one of those kids actually hit it on the end of this trunnion there's an H which you couldn't see and until they got in there and started scraping and the H is Haskell furnace which is over in England and only made cannons for the British army for three years so we were able to pin down within a three-year period when this cannon was made which was up and you know the kids were having fun too and that's pretty cool and then we unveiled it in our lobby and the cops got again you know lots of TV coverage and it got to be in the spotlight which was great fun and they also helped us with this one sometimes it's just a phone call I was at my desk on a typical day which when you know students come in and say so tell me what your typical day is I said yeah there's no such thing as a typical day and this is typical of my non-typical day they made a phone call I'm giving it away here and the guy had one of the divers had been not looking for a car and he put his hand on an arm and it was stiff I wasn't moving and then he kind of felt around and realized that this was this was a bronze statue at the foot of altar Road just in the when the water kind of next to where the car they didn't find the car and they got it out but they found this thing and so they took a couple of pictures you can see that their sea Arc is kind of tipping over as they're trying to get it up out of the water um they sent me these pictures on their phone and I got them actually at that time I didn't have a smart spoon I still had a flip phone so I had to send them one of my assistants uh they downloaded the pictures we sent these off to a couple people in our organization saying any idea anybody got any thoughts and I've been up the the CEO who lived in Gross Point and was on the board at the Gross Point war memorial which is the old Alger house over there said you know we used to have a statue like that it got stolen about 25 years ago and so he called the people at the at the war memorial they hopped in their car and by the time they got it down to the coast guard station who had a crane have good enough to lift the thing out of the boat those guys were standing there saying yep that's our statue and so it was a matter of about 35 minutes technology could be pretty cool wow now the downside of this was the insurance company had already paid them for the Statue so they had to go back to the insurance company and settle that up um but you know The gales of November they can be pretty tough um you know the good part is that the boats are no longer sailing into those they've got the information they're keeping people safe they've got the technology to not have to worry about that those that have been lost but you know if you think of even Swayze's number 4 700 votes if each of those boats hit 10 guys on it you know we're talking 47 000 Sailors that are down and we don't know how many were lost on canoes and that kind of thing so we're talking about a lot of people that have been launched over the eons sailing on our Lakes the best part we can get out of that is taking those wrecks leaving them on the bottom and you learn the hard way and and getting the information any information that's possible drawing that information out and it there's some wonderful groups around the Lakes the folks at the Wisconsin Historical Society are doing that um the folks up if there's Folks up in northern Michigan uh Robert Macon Straits Area folks in Traverse City Cleveland Ontario save Ontario shipwrecks is another organization there's a lot of people that are trying to make this stuff happen Chicago underwater explorers a lot of groups are trying to make you know get the information while we still can and while these things are available so you know real downside shipwrecks that's a bad thing upside shipwrecks can be a wonderful tool so that's what I've got thank you for listening I love talking about the Great Lakes [Applause] the shipwrecks move place you know that sometimes they move it depends on what they're what they're on and kind of how they went down uh they found that they found a wreck just recently and I saw the the shots and the thing just ordered right in and it's not moving um there was a wreck that they I saw a presentation last week on that was over near the Apostle Islands and because of the currents that run through the islands at various times and the fact that it was on a little bit of an incline it was it when it was pretty hard rock with a with a sand coating which you know made it easy for it to just slip the things slid a couple hundred yards since they recorded it you know so who knows how how much it slid since then um somebody had recorded uh recovered the boiler from that vessel back 35 40 years ago and a group of divers actually said well let's go put it back which was great you know it's kind of the counter process we're putting these things back down there so they took it out and they they put it down and set it down where they thought it was and they went back the next day to kind of secure it and it had moved 300 feet down that Hill they had to bring it back up and then they devised some really cool you know cabling for it so it's not going anywhere but yeah they do move I think most of the ones that go down and sit flat in open a little water where they're down far enough that the currents aren't impacted they're pretty much there I never yeah that thing that's on Niagara Falls that moved a little bit what will happen if that you know that big thing in Niagara Falls that hundred-year-old up on Niagara Falls there's like some bars up there that's oh really oh that they used is like a break wall or something no no no was it yeah so what happens if because of all the rain it moved it hadn't moved for 100 years what would happen if that big thing went down the Falls did it make a bigger wreck I don't know I think it would probably I don't I don't know I don't know what it's made of it would it would damage the Rocks probably not damage the rock are you stuck there like the camouflage sure how many times have we seen in the cartoons where the canoe gets this far over the the precipice and just kind of unreal I don't know that's I'd have to look it up I'm not aware that's kind of a funny question now I gotta I always come out to these things what did that Soul Survivor attribute to his ability to survive um he he attributed to luck and maybe the spirits of Bradley um yeah wasn't there two guys on a raft and one was under the other one that's the Bradley the morale and I'm trying to think of the fellowship in the world but we're all had the single Survivor and he was on a raft in his underwear on a pea coat he originally had four guys on the raft of all that one they lost them Dennis Hale that's it Dennis just died what last year a year a year ago Dennis that was tough um because he had rushed out he was in his underwear and a shirt and a life vest on the peacoat I mean when they got him he was um he was he wasn't comatose he wasn't unconscious but he wasn't really conscious guys the guys on the other raft uh were one was the first mate off the Bradley was the first mate and then Frank Mays and I'm not sure I don't remember what Frank didn't see one of the skewers I don't recall um he survived much better they weren't in the water that long that was off in Charlevoix they got recovered pretty quick Dennis Hill it was in for a while kind of question this preserve this might be silly The Preserve off Whitefish Point but does it go out as far as the Fitzgerald because isn't it like 17 miles out the Fitzgerald's actually in Canadian water so our Reserve doesn't reach it our diving nope no the Canadians there there have been a couple of expeditions down there and I think the Canadians have put a real kibosh on that they're you know they're treating it as a grave site they did I think allow somebody to send an ROV down a few years ago but they're not letting divers down to my knowledge I know a couple of guys that were actually that actually did that dive that free free diving not not 500 feet huh is that 500 feet thousand five thirty yeah that's a serious diving bricks Rick's a crazy guy but he's not too crazy so I don't think he's he's a pretty good if you ever see any videos by Rick mixer uh Rick does stuff about uh shipwrecks and he also does stuff about Aviation Great Lakes uh videographer because he does some fun stuff so if you see Rick's stuff Ric and then mixer so well good thanks for coming out from oh you had one more question yeah just uh the other night your lost Mariners remembrance was online and I watched it at home oh good is that still available is it you know I don't know I'd have to ask Neil schulteis about that okay I think it should be available or if it's not it will be soon usually he goes back and picks it up and then we'll rebroadcast and make it a permanent thing it was very interesting yeah we've been we've been webcasting that for probably the last 10 years thanks to MSU management education center in Troy I should just throw that in just because they do let us use their equipment for nothing and and Neil Neil's a wonderful guy Neil is one of those great volunteers there's a there's a webcam at the Dawson it was a webcam and what they call Vantage Point in Port Huron and he runs both of those things and completely volunteer he also drives the Westcott 2 the the mailboat so it's a Skipper and he's out since this year happens to be president of the International shipmasters Association live 73. so Neil's Neil's a real good guy and that's not even his day state job he's doing to attack up on the education side so big well thanks I appreciate you coming thank you some of you in December thanks [Music]

Channel: WROK Royal Oak

Views: 43,434

Keywords: royal oak, cable tv, WROK, WROK Royal Oak, Royal Oak City Commission

Id: _8H91jczpTw

Length: 70min 16sec (4216 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 30 2022