You know that feeling of discovering something new about someone you’ve loved for years, someone who you thought you knew everything about? The places we live can be like that too.
The Great Lakes are imprinted on our identity for a lot of us who live in Michigan. The state touches four of the five Great Lakes, and many of us have made significant memories in and on and near at least one of the Lakes. But there’s still so much to learn about our huge inland seas.
This is the first of five stories about the Great Lakes, one story per lake. A snapshot that tells a story about each of the lakes, a little microcosm of what makes each lake unique.
Chapter One: Lake Huron
The Great Lakes hold more than 20% of the fresh surface water in the entire world. If you live here or you’ve been here, you’ve probably gone to the beach. Maybe you’ve gone fishing or gotten water up your nose. But there’s so much more to the Lakes when you look below. Like shipwrecks!
There are thousands of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald. That famous ship went down in a massive storm in Lake Superior in 1975, killing all 29 men aboard.
Each of the Great Lakes has sunken ships. But in Lake Huron, there’s a place nicknamed Shipwreck Alley.
My coworker Jodi Westrick and I took a road trip north to Alpena from Ann Arbor to check it out.
If you think of Michigan like the palm of your right hand, the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is up at the tip of the pointer finger. It’s the very first freshwater marine sanctuary ever designated in the U.S.
“One of the uniqueness about marine sanctuaries is that we protect America’s ocean and Great Lakes treasures,” Jeff Gray, the sanctuary’s superintendent, told us.
“Those treasures are the coral reefs of the Florida Keys or the shipwrecks of Thunder Bay. They’re below the water line. And when you come to those places you don’t see them automatically. Ours is hidden. So we need to do a little more work to connect people to them.”
The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is 4,300 square miles of a protected area in the lake: full of shipwrecks.
“Through the historical record we’ve scoured the archives, and we’ve found historical evidence of about 200 vessels that have sank here through archaeology and science. We’re out searching the lake. We’ve located about 100 and there’s still about another hundred to find,” Gray said.
Exploring a shipwreck by paddleboard
On the warm day in late September when we visited, the surface of Lake Huron was so calm and clear. A perfect day to paddle out to see a shipwreck called The Portland. It’s a two masted schooner that sank in a really bad storm in 1877.
To see it, Jodi and I took a ride out to the lake with Sarah Morrison and Sophie Stuart with the sanctuary. Stuart parked the big six-wheeled truck in the lot at the edge of the woods.
“We’ve got life jackets, we've got air pumps, we've got paddles. We've got everything for an adventure,” Morrison said.
As she plugged the air pump in and started inflating the kayak, I made what I thought was just a joke to Jodi.
“What if it deflates while we’re out there?”
And that is what we call foreshadowing.
Jodi and I grabbed a handle on either side of the kayak and started down the wooded path to the beach.
“I don’t want to drag it in the poison ivy,” I said.
“Oh God, there’s poison ivy?” said Jodi.
We had the wide, sandy beach almost entirely to ourselves. I took off my shoes and rolled up my jeans and waded into the shockingly warm water.
“When we say you can walk the majority of the way to the shipwreck, we’re not kidding,” said Stuart. “This is what would happen, is a ship would find shelter in a bay, like the Portland, and then be driven further inland because of a storm resulting in wrecking on the rocks. Even in safe harbor from the storm.”
“Wow, okay, so it was really quite dangerous,” I said.
“Oh yeah. We have lots of saltwater captains who talk about, they’ve had more dangerous encounters on the Great Lakes than they have in saltwater.”
Stuart said that’s because of the wave patterns.
“The waves don’t have a lull in between, so when you’ve got waves, they’re just going to hit one after another after another. So that causes a lot of problems. And around here, then, the limestone reefs that are so shallow.”
Stuart said this area includes the main shipping channel for ships to move between the lower lakes and the upper lakes.
“They would have to go past Thunder Bay. So it’s kind of the natural turning point in Lake Huron. You’ve got hundreds of ships going back and forth. Collisions were a very common thing in good weather or poor weather. Our storms come up very aggressively, as does our fog. Lake Huron has reported waves up to 30 feet high,” she said.
But first, a deflating kayak
Jodi and I got into the kayak carefully. We didn’t want to get our expensive equipment wet.
But then, just a few minutes after we’ve left the beach, everything went sideways. Water kept sloshing in over the side of the kayak.
“I think we might not be very well inflated,” I said.
“My pants are wet,” Jodi laughed.
Jodi jumped out soaking wet. So, on to Plan B.
She stayed on shore and I climbed onto Sarah Morrison’s paddleboard and sat cross legged on the front while she paddled us out into the lake.
Lake Huron was so clear we could see right to the bottom.
“And the buoy is right in front of us. These buoys not only make it easier to find the shipwrecks so you can explore them, but you’re also going to see like a yellow tow line on the buoys where you can easily anchor, whether you have a boat or you know, a lot of paddleboards and kayaks have those bungee cords you can tie directly up to it,” Morrison said.
As we paddled out, Morrison told me about the storm the Portland encountered.
“And that storm pushed the boat closer and closer to shore, so that the rocks actually did start to tear holes in it, leading to it sinking. So thankfully, the crew was able to survive. So often when you're close to shore like that, that is the benefit of being washed ashore in a storm.”
“We're getting closer, so hopefully we'll be seeing something in just a moment,” Morrison said. “I think it might actually be in — ope, there’s part of it.”
The thick wooden beams of the Portland emerged below us, looking like railroad tracks under the water.
“Imagine snorkeling this,” said Morrison. “We always say please don't touch. But you can get very, very close to this wreck.”
“We highlight our shipwrecks a bit more than maybe other parts of the Great Lakes. Where maybe it's more of a word of mouth or, you know, because there are shipwrecks all over the Great Lakes, but here it is easier to recreate on them like this. Look at this. We're just sailing over these huge beams.”
We paddled back to shore, where Sophie Stuart explained why the Great Lakes are so good at preserving these wrecks.
“Lake Huron is obviously our favorite because of the sanctuary. But in all five of the Great Lakes, the cold, fresh, deep water is what is preserving those wrecks."
"So if you take a wooden shipwreck and sink it in the Atlantic Ocean, say you’re looking at a ship from the 1800s, there are different microorganisms and creatures in warm, salty water that will eat wood and deteriorate those shipwrecks a lot faster. Specifically, Teredo worms and other things like that,” she said.
“So, we get shipwrecks off the Atlantic coast where all that’s left is the iron fastenings or cannons or cannonballs because all of the wood has literally been eaten away, whereas here those microorganisms and creatures can’t survive in cold fresh water.”
That means these Great Lakes shipwrecks are much more intact.
“One that’s really famous is in Lake Michigan is the Rouse Simmons or the Christmas Tree Ship, and that one would carry cargoes of Christmas trees from the U.P. down to Chicago. And that wreck still has the trunks of the Christmas trees of the last cargo on board.”
The job of an underwater archaeologist
Scuba divers come to Lake Huron from all over to check out these shipwrecks, and so do maritime archaeologists. That job is just what it sounds like: someone who studies archaeology underwater.
“Thunder Bay is really known for having exceptional levels of preservation on its shipwrecks. So any underwater archaeologist is always excited about coming up to the Great Lakes. So when the position came available, I jumped on it, even though I’d never been to Michigan before,” said Andi Yoxsimer.
She’s a resource protection specialist at the Thunder Bay Marine Sanctuary.
“I’m from Reno, Nevada so I grew up close to Lake Tahoe and I thought Lake Tahoe was a big lake. I remember the first time I came here, I'm flying into Alpena, and you are on a plane and you can't see the other side of the lake. And it blew my mind. Like I had no idea the Great Lakes were as big as they are.”
We met up with Yoxsimer on a research boat that’s tied to a dock at the marina early the next morning. She was about to go do something called multibeam mapping.
“What it does is sends sound down into the water column and then basically like echolocation, how long it takes for that sound to reach our boat again. That’ll tell us water depths. We use that to get really high definition maps of the sanctuary. We protect submerged cultural resources so we’re always looking for more shipwrecks, so that’s something we’re always keeping an eye out for on the maps as well,” she said.
Yoxsimer said a lot of the shipwrecks they haven’t found yet are probably in the deeper waters of the bay.
Filet of schooner
She said even though shipwrecks have a better shot at surviving in the Great Lakes, there are some challenges.
“Ice can be a large issue for our really shallow shipwrecks. We call it ‘filet of schooner’ because all of our shallow shipwrecks are quite broken down. Also we deal a lot with zebra and quagga mussels. Those have become a huge issue in the Great Lakes. Most of our shipwrecks are covered in mussels,” she said.
“But then another factor that we’re always looking at is the human interaction with shipwrecks. We want people to dive them, we want people to be on these shipwrecks. We want them to see them. We really feel that like, until you can see something you’re not going to want to protect it. So we want people to interact with these sites, we want them to have a personal connection. Of course the flip side of that is you know people you’re allowing onto sites, unfortunately, the more likely it is that some artifacts are going to disappear.”
Yoxsimer said it can be difficult to get artifacts back.
“Unfortunately a lot of times, they end up on, like, Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist. I know recently some of our timbers from one of our shipwrecks were recently recovered because someone had tried to sell them on Facebook Marketplace. So yeah it’s a constant struggle trying to find these artifacts again. And unfortunately, a lot of them are not recovered.”
How could climate change affect the wrecks?
The team at Thunder Bay is also collecting water samples they send to Reagan Errera. She’s a research ecologist at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory.
Reagan and her team are studying freshwater acidification in Lake Huron. It’s a process related to our changing climate. And it’s something that these scientists think might affect the shipwrecks.
“So within the atmosphere, CO2 in particular is increasing. And that increase has to go somewhere it can stay in the atmosphere, or it can go into different bodies of water that become a sink for it. You've probably heard of things like corals having issues creating their backbone structure because of the acidification we're seeing in the oceans. Well, freshwater also the same equation applies,” Errera said.
She said there’s not a lot of research yet about what’s happening with freshwater acidification in Lake Huron, and how that might affect the shipwrecks.
“We don't really know how that might then lead to potential stress or deterioration of those heritage sites. On top of that, there's not a lot of work or research looking into how acidification could impact wood or metal structures that have been underwater. One of the great reasons we have these wonderful sites is because it's cold and it's stable where they're located. But if those environmental conditions start to change, it could also change how they're preserved.”
From Lake Huron to Hollywood and back
Before we head home, Jodi and I took a trip on a glass bottom boat, the Lady Michigan, that visits some of the shipwrecks a little farther out from shore.
Captain Matt Southwell grew up in the area.
“I’ve been diving these wrecks since I was a kid. So I’ve always been in love with the wrecks and our shipwreck history," he told us.
He said he started diving on a wreck called the Shamrock outside his aunt and uncle’s house when he was nine.
“And then when we hit it, it’s like ugh! What is that? It spooks you! It kind of creeps you out because it used to be a living, working vessel, you know? And you automatically think — people died on this, even though no one died on that wreck at all.”
Before he was a captain, though, he went to Hollywood.
“Back in my old life, I was an actor, I was in a couple of TV shows. And really when I left the music business and the acting profession and moved back from Hollywood to here, I knew I had to do something that had the same amount of passion that I had for that stuff in the arts, and the lake and the wrecks is definitely where my passion lied. And this job was the corridor toward that.”
But he said being a captain is still a dangerous job.
“Being a captain on the Great Lakes means you have to respect them. You have to understand these are inland seas and they can turn ornery real quick.”
He said these lakes have to be respected.
“They’re extremely dangerous. When I worked in the Arctic, the thing that shocked me the most was some of these pre-eminent oceanographers, are like 'well they get 20 foot waves on the Great Lakes.' I’m like, are you out of your mind? I got two words for you: Edmund Fitzgerald, man. Out here, the weather can change at the drop of a hat.”
Even mild weather affects how Southwell guides the Lady Michigan on tours. He and his crew have to monitor slight wind and wave changes to make sure the passengers will be able to see the wrecks through the boat’s transparent bottom.
“The wrecks and learning the history is, I think, huge to people because it lets them know where they came from. And if you don’t know where you came from, how do you know where you’re going?”
There are still about a hundred shipwrecks that remain hidden in the depths here in Shipwreck Alley in Thunder Bay, despite all the explorers, researchers, and even former Hollywood actors, who spend their days devoted to their preservation and discovery.
In a lot of ways, the Great Lakes really are like our loved ones who remain partial mysteries to us. To know them better, to understand their pasts, we just have to stay close and keep digging.
Jodi Westrick and Rebecca Williams reported and produced this episode, with editing from Vincent Duffy, Dustin Dwyer, and Jodi Westrick. Special thanks to Meredith Luneack and Randi Kest.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
Beyond the Shore is a production of Michigan Public.
