A-hunting we will go

 June 15, 2021

Presque Isle to Harrisville

In spite of the excitement of the previous evening, we were up early (Feather's Fault), and decided to head on out. 

Our plan was to make our way down the thumb maybe to Port Austin or Lexington, but first Chuck wanted to see a man about a shipwreck.





Now, many of you may have noticed that I have this thing about lighthouses (that I share with my mother), and some of you may have even thought to yourselves that Chuck "is a saint for humoring her like this..." as we went out of our way to get pictures of every lighthouse within a 50 mile radius during our trip (not literally). What you may not know is that the reason Chuck and I work is that we've both come to love, not only tolerate, the other's idiosyncrasies.   

Chuck has a thing about shipwrecks.   

 And OK, maybe Chuck just tolerates my love of lighthouses, but I really am fascinated by the shipwrecks he has shared with me over the years.   On one of my first kayak paddling adventures with Pops and Chuck, he took me "rolling" over the shipwrecks in Tobermory, ONT.  It was love at first sight for the shipwrecks and the culmination of a slow burn kind of realization for me that I was supposed to be, not just friends with Chuck,  but to be "with" Chuck.

Chuck comes from a long line of Great Lakes sailors. Chuck's Great Grandfather  (Thomas Smith) went down with his ship ( the L J Conway) in Lake Michigan.  His Great Grandmother was also a ship's captain before she was married to Thomas.  Pops (Chuck's dad) was one of the first certified dive instructors in Detroit and Chuck has been diving with him for 30 years.  They both have awesome stories about dives on the Great Lakes and around the world. He's been trying to talk me into diving lessons for years, and I may be bending in that direction.  But for this trip, we had no plans to dive, but we did have this handy-dandy little drone that I told you about earlier in the blog:  The FiFish.


Our first target after leaving Presque Isle was the New Orleans.  Chuck had downloaded GPS coordinates for some wrecks at home, but I was using this web app, made by the DNR: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer.  Once we found the coordinates, dive buoys were supposed to indicate the wreck.  


 Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, there was no buoy on this wreck (or many others we looked for; our hypothesis is that they were pulled for the winter (to protect from ice) and not placed again yet because it was still early in the diving season.  Fortunately however, and this is really cool, we somehow managed to pass right over the wreck and capture it in the SONAR.   Unfortunately, my photo of the screen is crap.  (Note: Chuck's notes had labeled this wreck, the Philadelphia, which  collided with the Albany and then sank trying to tow the Albany in to Presque Isle.  This position would make sense for the Philadelphia, but it is labeled the New Orleans on this app.  The app has no "Philadelphia" in this area.  We didn't actually see the wreck so it's hard to say which is correct.


Here's a link to a video of what it might have looked like if it was the Philadelphia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyOg7URTujE

Buoyed (did you notice what I did there?) by our SONAR success (Chuck has told me stories of days spent searching for a shipwreck before being able to find and dive it), we decided to try for another:  the Dunderberg.  This, too, was a fail, but here is a link to what we might have seen: 
https://www.wrecksandreefs.com/dunderbe.htm

Now, obviously, this blog isn't supposed to be a collection of things other people did, so I probably wouldn't have shared any of this had it not been for our eventual success(es).  The next wreck we looked for was the Nordmeer, and Chuck spotted the diving buoy well before we got to the coordinates.  


But that story will have to wait for another post.


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