Within sight of the Chicago skyline, I stepped off the gunwale of the 47-foot Seaquest II into Lake Michigan and deflated my buoyancy wing. We’d left the dock in Hammond, Indiana under a moody sky and spitting rain, but after an hour’s cruise, the clouds parted and the lake’s surface flattened out. The sun cast filtered shafts of “God light” onto the skyscrapers in the distance, the last view I saw before descending 50 feet into the blue-green depths. I followed the yellow mooring line down to where it was tied in to an auger on the lake bed. And then, there it was: a ship’s anchor, standing proud of the mud. It was coated with algae and quogga mussels but was unmistakable, looking like the archetypal sailor’s tattoo, with a five-foot shank and one fluke pointing to the surface it hadn’t seen in over a century. An intact anchor on a shipwreck is a thrill for any diver and if I wasn’t already chilled from the 59-degree water I’d have gotten goosebumps. To mark the moment, I looked down at my left wrist. The Benrus Ultra-Deep diving watch nestled under the cuff of my thick glove read 9:14.
The Great Lakes, a chain of five huge inland seas that hold over 20% of the world’s freshwater, have provided a connected passage for cargo and passenger vessels since the early 19th century. Ships have carried coal, iron ore, lumber and grain between the American states and Canadian provinces that border the lakes, as well as beyond to Europe through the St. Lawrence Seaway. This long history of commercial shipping on the lakes has inevitably brought its share of tragedy. Some estimates put the number of shipwrecks littering the lake beds at over 6,000, most well preserved in the icy, salt-free depths. Many have been identified and dived, some picked clean of their artifacts or even cut up for salvage. But there are countless others that have remained undiscovered or unnamed, making the Great Lakes a shipwreck hunter’s dream.
Some say most of the great wrecks in the Great Lakes have already been found and explored. So to dive a newly discovered one, replete with anchor, wheel, and windlass felt like a rare glimpse into the golden age of diving and shipwreck discovery. To do it wearing a Benrus Ultra-Deep made it all the more evocative, tying me to the lineage of those mid-century explorers who braved the cold inland seas, perhaps some even wearing the same watch.
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