- Today we are pleased to introduce
John Janzen and Tamara Thompson as part of
the Wisconsin Historical Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture series.
The opinions expressed today are those
of the presenters and are not necessarily
those of the Wisconsin Historical Society
or the Museum's employees.
John Janzen is a rebreather and technical diving
instructor who has been diving the Great Lakes
for more than 25 years.
In 2007, he and John Scoles recovered
the Bradley's bell,
which was the deepest artifact recovery
ever performed in the Great Lakes
by autonomous divers.
The story is told in the Emmy award-winning
documentary November Requiem .
John has worked as a diver and videographer
for National Geographic, NOAA,
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution,
Michigan State Police, U.S. Coast Guard,
Wisconsin Historical Society, History Channel,
the National Museum of the Great Lakes,
and other regional museums.
Tamara Thompson is a maritime archaeologist
with the Wisconsin Historical Society's
Maritime Preservation and Archaeology Program.
Her fieldwork has resulted in the listing of
41 Great Lakes shipwrecks and two submerged
historic districts to the National Register
of Historic Places.
Her work has been acknowledged with several awards
and in 2014 she was inducted into the
Women Divers Hall of Fame.
Beyond her work for the Society,
she has participated as a photographer,
researcher, and research diver
on projects ranging from the USS Monitor
with NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries
to RMS Titanic with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
Here today to share the story of the Rouse Simmons,
please join me in welcoming Tamara Thompson
and John Janzen.
(audience applause)
- Thank you, Katie.
I'm gonna go first.
And so the way that this is gonna work today
is that I'm gonna go through a little bit of the history
and talk about what we learned during
the 2007 archaeological survey of the Rouse Simmons,
and then I am going to
let John come up and show some video
that he took just this last summer
so you can see what the shipwreck
looks like currently.
So this is the Rouse Simmons.
The Rouse Simmons was built in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
in 1868 at the Allan McClelland ship yard.
She was very standard
for a lumber schooner build.
She has three masts
and she did have two centerboard trunks
which is a little bit interesting of a design
for this type of vessel.
She's 124 feet long with a 23-foot beam.
What's kind of interesting is many people don't know this.
Does anyone know who Rouse Simmons is?
Rouse Simmons is actually the brother of,
the owner of the Simmons Mattress Company
out of Kenosha.
He was actually a grocer and was involved
with the bank there in Kenosha
and we believe sponsored the building
of this particular ship,
and so therefore it was named after him.
So she led a very long career.
She sailed for 30 some odd years.
Actually owned by Charles Hackley
who was a lumber baron out of Muskegon, Michigan,
and she was very much used to build his fortune there.
So she was not involved with Christmas tree sales
at all through her career,
except for in her last two years of service.
So in 1910,
she was purchased by the man in the middle
who is Herman Schuenemann.
He's a captain from Chicago,
and he and his brother had been involved
in the Christmas tree business for many,
many years prior.
So sort of their scheme for business was that they
would partially buy into older vessels.
They participated as captains or sailors
early on in their career and they would go out
on the last run of the year with the vessels.
They would go up to Thompson, Michigan
where they would hire lumberjacks
to go out in the woods and cut trees
to bring down to Chicago and sell to
the heavy German population that was there.
So by 1910 we have to remember that
this was well past the age of sail.
The height of the age of sail was really
in the mid-1870s, and so 1910,
his business scheme was modeled
around banking on the nostalgia
of disappearing sailing vessels.
All right?
So this is really what they would do is,
they would bring these ships in.
They would stack the Christmas trees on the decks.
They would string up garland and wreaths
and the family would really be involved in this operation
to try to sell Christmas trees.
And again, this is a model that they had been doing
for many, many years.
But by 1912, the year the Rouse Simmons sank,
his competitors in this Christmas tree business
were bringing their trees down to Chicago by train,
and in a lot of cases they were selling them
in rail yards or yards.
Kind of like we go to the mall today
and buy them out of a lot.
That's how you would buy Christmas trees
or you could go down and maybe for
a few pennies more,
buy your Christmas tree off the deck of a ship in a harbor.
I mean, wouldn't you want to do that?
That sounds like a really interesting business model.
So in a lot of cases
these particular ships didn't go out.
They just dragged them over to the dock
and stacked the Christmas trees on the deck,
and then sold the trees
from the deck of the boat.
So this actually is the George Wren,
which is the outbound vessel in this particular picture.
This was a ship that was owned prior
to the Rouse Simmons by Herman Schuenemann.
So Herman Schuenemann,
like I said he and his brother were involved
with this business of selling these Christmas trees
and Herman Schuenemann went out every single year
to take this last run of the season.
The only year that he missed was 1898
when his twin daughters were born in November
and he stayed behind and his brother went out.
His brother subsequently died aboard
their ship "The Thal,"
just outside the breakwater of Chicago.
So that the birth of his daughters actually
was very fortunate for Herman Schuenemann.
But he continued on in the Christmas tree business
and selling the Christmas trees
and marketing them from the deck.
So this is the last known image of the Rouse Simmons.
This was taken in 1911.
It's published in the Marine Review,
which is a newspaper out of Chicago in 1913,
but we can see very much the state of disrepair
of this particular vessel.
We see that her hull, her outer hull planking,
is a little sprung.
We see that they've constructed this temporary
shelter for being able to buy the Christmas trees
aboard the ship.
She looks in very, very rough shape,
and this is true.
Again, with being a business owner you need
to make decisions.
You need to decide how much money
your gonna put into your 43-year-old vessel
to keep it afloat if you're only going to sail it
for one run a year.
And that's what we know about the Rouse Simmons, too,
by looking at a lot of the reports about this vessel,
is that they forewent caulking the vessel,
which was a matter of keeping it watertight.
And then we don't know whether they
removed some of the deck planking
in order to construct this.
Did they sail with this particular structure on the deck?
Or is this something that they built once
they came back to the dock to provide shelter
for the workers?
So these are still a lot of questions that we have
about the Rouse Simmons and their practices.
But we know that Herman Schuenemann probably
made a lot of erroneous mistakes
when he went out in 1912
to take the ship north.
They had some leaks.
They forewent the caulking again at Sturgeon Bay.
They took the trees.
They went all the way up to Thompson, Michigan
to get the trees,
and when they came back on their route back
on the 23rd of November it sank.
So we can plot out from looking at
the life-saving station documents.
These are log books.
You have to remember that the life-saving service
back around the turn of the century or just after,
this is paramilitary service,
so they were required to fill out log books.
They kept catalogs of the weather on the hour.
If they had to assist another vessel,
that was reported in their log books.
So we know an awful lot about what happened
during the days and hours prior to
and shortly after the sinking of the Rouse Simmons.
So they left Thompson, Michigan
and as the story or the fable that many of you know
it was not blowing a gale.
They left under a strong wind.
And in order to kind of avoid some of the brunt of that wind
they sailed close to the shoreline.
They tried to sail in the lee of the shore
and they hugged that coastline all the way down the coast.
When they were off of Kewaunee, Wisconsin,
this was at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon
on the 23rd of November,
they passed very close by,
and the life-saving service there spotted the vessel
and they spotted it flying an ensign,
an American flag upside-down from its rigging,
and that's a sign of distress.
And so by 1912, remember there were telephones,
so they telephoned down to the Two Rivers Station
because the Kewaunee station only had a rowboat,
and so they would have to go out
and row after this vessel that was heading
southbound with the wind behind it.
And so they called the station in Two Rivers
and these are the gentlemen in Two Rivers that responded.
The little boy on the end probably didn't go out with them,
but remained at the station.
But they had a powered lifeboat,
and it would've looked very similar to this.
And they went out,
they launched the boat at 3:10
and they began their search.
They came out around Rawley Point
and they reported again in their log book
because they were required to make these entries,
that they could see,
they made Rawley Point by 4 o'clock.
They could see nearly all the way to Kewaunee
and they could not see a ship in distress.
So here's the Rouse Simmons again heading south.
Here's our life-savers in green heading around the point.
And they could not see any ship there.
So doing due diligence,
they spent an hour heading north
and they headed north toward Kewaunee
thinking that they might encounter some debris
or flotsam or victims in the water.
They then headed out into the lake for another hour,
and by this time it's 6 o'clock in the evening
and it's starting to get dark.
And in the log book where they're reporting,
also the weather conditions,
it picked up to a gale and it started to snow.
Okay, so there was a bad storm that happened.
It happened, though, unfortunately well after
the Rouse Simmons was on the bottom.
So we plotted out where Kent Bellrichard discovered,
the Milwaukee diver that found actually a lot
of shipwrecks here in Wisconsin waters,
and this is where he found the Rouse Simmons.
We plotted their course based on about how fast
one of those powered lifeboats could go
and we can see that they circumnavigated
where the Rouse Simmons is on the bottom.
So had that boat been on the surface
at 4 o'clock in the afternoon when the life-savers
rounded Rawley Point,
these sailors and the lumberjacks that were
catching a ride back to Chicago probably would
have had a chance to survive, but it was,
we know that it had to have sunk
sometime after 3 o'clock and before 4 o'clock
when it came out of the range of what the
Kewaunee life-saving station could see
and before the life-savers from Two Rivers could get there.
So in 2007 we received a grant from
Wisconsin Coastal Management Program
to do a systematic study.
Literally thousands of divers have dived
on this particular shipwreck
up until the point that we,
the Wisconsin Historical Society and our volunteers,
went out to take a look at this wreck.
And we really wanted to document what was there,
what the condition of the particular
the wreck was today,
and be able to look and see if we can answer
the questions why it went down, why it sank.
And so like I said, a lot of people have dived on this,
there's been lots of documentation
throughout the years,
but no one had really looked at what had
happened to it.
We set up a line here, we are descending down,
and you can see the visibility on this particular wreck site
is generally pretty good, so what we have is,
we have the introduction of zebra mussels,
everyone knows zebra mussels.
Well, they've really been outcompeted by
quagga mussels now,
and the quagga mussels are a more robust cousin.
They're a little bit bigger,
they can go a little bit deeper.
They filter a little bit more water.
They don't require the current that the zebra mussels do.
So what you look at when you're seeing
these pictures are about 98% quagga mussels
and mostly zebras,
but we did such a good job, I think,
marketing zebra mussels that we had to change
everybody's nomenclature to quagga's pretty hard.
So what did we find when we went down there?
Well, the first thing that was surprising to us
was the direction that the ship was facing.
So remember they were heading south
along the Wisconsin coastline.
They were hugging the coastline.
But if we look at what direction they were heading,
they were heading back to the northeast,
back toward the shore, back towards Kewaunee.
And we wanted to figure out why this was.
And if we look at the direction of the winds,
they had come into Iron,
so they were slowing down.
They'd brought their vessel's bow around to the wind
and we were looking for other clues as to what
they were doing.
And if you look at this image you can see here
there's Christmas trees that are stacked here
and John will show you some really great video
of all the trees that remain stacked in the hold.
But what I see here is a pile of chain, which is here,
and more chain which is,
and actually if you look at it,
it's called, it's faked back and forth.
So it's strung out end to end so that it could,
as you deploy an anchor it could easily
go over the side and not become entangled.
And so we thought,
well, okay, maybe they were going to be setting
the anchor if they're bringing the boat's bow,
or maybe they had anchored,
bring the boat's bow into the wind,
you would be trying to maybe launch a lifeboat.
There were 16 men aboard and one work boat,
a yawl, that would probably could have held
seven or eight people,
so you know there were some really hard decisions
that were being made aboard this vessel
when it was going down.
But we also see some very interesting things
if we look a little closer at the windlass.
The windlass is this ratchet mechanism here
which would be used to bring your anchors up.
And we see two things.
We see here that this is hooped around,
bagged up, it's not coiled around that ratchet mechanism.
And then the other thing we see is,
we see this very curious staple here,
which we learned is called a Norman Pin.
So we went and we found some documents
from a gentleman named Luden Wilson.
Wilson was an old-time sailor and he took notes
and he did a lot of drawings.
I'm in his notebooks and they live at
the Bowling Green State University collection.
And we were able to get a hold of them
and find out how they treated these windlasses
to be able to anchor their vessel.
So on the side of the windlass that they're not
going to deploy, because you don't deploy both anchors,
you deploy one.
And then the other one you would just,
you keep it loose here.
There would be this thing called a strongback
that would go across the top of the windlass
and then this is loose and it would spin freely within it.
And then they would take some rope
and they would hold this up so that it would stay up
and it wouldn't catch on that ratchet.
And what do we see when we actually look
on the Rouse Simmons?
Is we see exactly that.
You see this sort of peaked area here
and if we look very, very closely,
you can see little nubs of fiber.
The rope is still there.
So it's become impregnated with the iron from the chain
and so it's still there.
So that is exactly what they were doing.
The starboard anchor was not the one
that was going to be deployed.
Okay, we also know that because we looked
at very early video that was taken.
Some of the very first video,
underwater video taken on this particular ship
shows the starboard anchor still chained up
to its cathead,
and so it was not going to be ready
to be deployed.
That anchor, by the way,
if you do get over to Milwaukee,
was recovered by the discoverers of this particular ship
and it's on display at the Milwaukee Yacht Club.
So it's kind of neat.
They decorate with Christmas lights
and they have a celebration about
the Christmas Tree Ship every year.
Okay, so let's talk about the port side anchor.
So we see here in Luden Wilson's drawing
that as they're getting ready to deploy the anchor,
and here it is attached to the cathead,
they take out the chain and they run it
and fake it back and forth.
Sound familiar?
And then you see this little odd thing here?
He describes that staple,
it's a very, very early chain stopper,
and that is called the Norman Pin.
So we believe that they were trying to deploy
or had deployed the port side anchor.
So here we are when we're looking at the
wreck of the Rouse Simmons.
We do see this Norman Pin.
Now this needs to be driven into the windlass
with a mallet.
You need to just smack it really hard
and get it down there so that it clenches
and stays there.
But this one has not been driven down.
You could see that if the windlass was going
to spin or turn,
it would not clear the deck beam here,
and so it's in the process
of being secured,
but not quite yet.
The other thing that we see when we're looking
for other clues is we see this hook here.
I don't know if you can see the hook
through the zebra mussels or quagga mussels
that we have here.
This hook would've been used to bring the anchor
away from the ship once they loosened it
from the cathead so that it wouldn't smash
into the side of the hull.
And so that would've been,
that type of equipment is used for lowering the anchor.
And that is there on the port side of the ship,
just under the weather deck.
The other thing that we see here is, remember,
we had the starboard anchor that was still lashed in.
What happened to that port anchor?
So we look here and we see the hawsepipe
and we see the anchor chain running out of
the hawsepipe and over the bowsprit.
Anchor chains normally don't do that,
so we thought this is very, very strange.
And so we had a volunteer,
a younger guy that was working for us
named Ethan Brodsky,
and we sent him down and we wanted him
to measure the length of chain,
because it goes into the sand.
So he went down and measured it.
And we said, "Did you follow it out?"
Well, it looks like it keeps going
so we went back the next dive and we sent him down
and he followed the chain for a little bit
and he's like, "Whoa, that's a long way out there."
He never made it out to the end of the chain
so I was trying to figure out whether
the anchor's still out there or whether these early guys
sold the anchor to like the closest seafood restaurant
so they could cover some of their bills
and expenses for going to locate the ship,
which was pretty common to do.
And so we went back and we looked at some
of the early video because that's the reason
that the chain would be there,
is that they would've put the anchor up
on lift bags if the anchor had been still on the cathead
when they discovered the Rouse Simmons
in these early videos.
Then they could've shot the lift bag,
brought it up a little bit, cut the chain,
and the chain would've fallen over the bowsprit.
But that's not the case because when we looked at
the early video it's exactly in the same orientation
that the chain comes out over the bowsprit.
So this made us question as to whether
they were trying to set the anchor and what happened.
So we went out the next spring.
Like, I got a hold of this early video in December
and spring couldn't come early enough
for us to go and look for this anchor
and finally follow it out to the length of it.
And so 170 feet away from the shipwreck
is in fact the anchor.
And it looks to be set.
However, the ship is only in 165 feet of water,
so and they have 170 feet of anchor deployed,
chain deployed,
and so this would not hold the ship.
In the conditions which was the strong wind,
they would have needed to have a 10 to 1
in order to stabilize that ship and come to anchor.
So did they drop this intentionally?
Were they using it as a sea anchor
to stabilize the ship to bring the bow into the wind
so that they could launch the lifeboats and get off?
Or had they accidentally deployed the anchor?
And those are questions that we were
left with the next year.
We went out in 2009.
This is right before the 100th anniversary of Titanic, too,
so we had some friends from Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution come here
and they were testing equipment,
camera equipment that they were going
to be taking to Titanic.
And we were also testing models for creating
these 3D mosaics of ships.
And so this is the Rouse Simmons in whole.
You can see that some divers have placed
a Christmas tree here on the bow.
But what's interesting is that all of the rigging
is thrown forward.
So it's as if it's catapulted off of the bow.
So we believe that it was leaky.
We know that because they had not gotten
the ship caulked.
That they were taking on so much water
and as that water sloshes around,
it tends to tip and move things,
if you ever tried to drive with any kind of liquid
or a liquid holding tank of any kind,
you know that it sloshes you around.
And so this is the same thing that was happening here.
That that liquid ran forward,
they caught a wave, they came down,
they hit bow first and we can see the divot here.
And this is not scouring that would've occurred
from currents that are on the bottom,
although there are some.
But this is a divot where the ship struck.
And they were attempting to deploy their anchor.
They knew that they were in bad shape.
They had passed Kewaunee and they were flying
a distress signal.
And as they went down and all of this rigging
catapulted forward,
the anchor also came loose and that's what
cracked off the bowsprit of the ship.
So if we can get John up he can show some,
his video from this last summer.
We were able to go back out to the site
and we tried to catalog every so many years
what's going on with it,
any kind of natural deterioration,
and so John was out with us this last summer,
so he'll show some of that.
- I want to tell you a little bit about
what it's like to dive on the Rouse Simmons.
Now as Tammy mentioned,
this ship's in about 165 feet of water,
so this is well beyond what we call
the recreational dive limit of about 130 feet.
And so we are using specialty equipment
which you may have seen in some
of Tammy's pictures already,
and you'll probably see in my video.
And this is a picture of the equipment that I use.
This is called a closed circuit rebreather apparatus
and it's literally the state-of-the-art
of sport diving today.
Instead of venting my exhaled gas off into the water
and bubbling away,
my exhaled gas is captured and recycled
back into this unit,
so it's very efficient at saving gas.
So I can use about 20 times less breathing gas
than a regular, traditional scuba diver.
It also provides some advantages for decompression.
Because this depth is so deep,
we have a very limited amount of time
that we can stay on the bottom.
And as we come up, we have to come up slowly,
and in stages.
We have to make certain stops.
If we were to just come directly up from the bottom,
our blood would literally bubble like when
you open a soda bottle too fast.
That's what would happen,
and that's called decompression sickness.
Or the bends.
And it's more than just achy joints.
You can get paralysis, hearing loss,
nerve damage, stroke.
It can kill ya.
So we always want to minimize our decompression risk.
Because the water is so cold,
it's always around 35 to 42 degrees
at the bottom on the Rouse Simmons.
It's very cold.
We wear dry suits that keep us dry
and I actually have a battery pack here,
it's a little hard to see.
I wear electrically heated underwear under this garment.
So it doesn't protect my fingers and toes
from getting stingy cold,
but it does allow me to do quite long dives.
In fact, the video I'll show you today,
I took all the video in one dive.
One and a half hours I spent on the wreck
and my decompression to come up
was about a half hour, about 30 minutes.
So I only have about 10 minutes of video,
but I edited it down from about an hour and a half.
Here's another picture of me on a decompression stop.
So this would be the line that goes from the boat
down to whatever shipwreck I'm on.
And you see here I carry these two
traditional scuba cylinders.
Well that's because my rebreather is
an electronic, electromechanical device.
It's literally an electronic life support system.
There's a computer on my wrist
that is metering in oxygen as my body needs it.
And it's literally electronics that are keeping me alive.
Should that fail, and it can,
I would go to these backup cylinders
which are traditional scuba cylinders,
because remember,
if I have this decompression obligation,
I can't just say oh I'm gonna go straight up
and the dive's over.
I won't survive because of the decompression obligation.
So if we have problems underwater,
we have to solve them underwater
and that's what the backup gas supply is for.
And this is a picture of me with the camera system
that I used to do the video that you're gonna see.
Inside of this pressure housing is a standard
Canon camera like you might use on land,
and I have four 50-watt lights,
because it can be dark down there.
And this is a monitor screen that I look through
when I am taking the video.
Okay, so with that,
I am going to show you some video
and take you on a dive to the Rouse Simmons.
To make this more realistic,
we should've turned the heat off
and opened all the doors.
(audience laughter)
For those watching this program later,
it's below zero outside today.
It would be a very effective way to feel
what it's like to dive in the Great Lakes.
This is one of the Rouse Simmon's daughters
at the wheel of the ship.
So here we are.
Obviously we're at the bow of the ship.
Right now this is one of the catheads.
There were two of them,
and that's where the anchors would hang from
during storage.
And I'll point out Christmas trees throughout
this presentation,
but they're not big, bushy trees like you might imagine.
They're kind of degraded from being underwater
for so long.
So you can still see the support ribs
that held the deck planks,
but most of the deck planks have either
floated away or they're collapsed down
into the hull of the ship.
So I'm going to be swimming toward the stern.
Now one of the unique aspects of the Rouse Simmons
is that it had two centerboard trunks.
Centerboard trunks on a sailing vessel
were put down in order to stabilize the vessel from tipping,
and also prevented the vessel from being
pushed sideways in the water.
And the Rouse Simmons had two of these.
Normally, or most sailing ships had one.
So that's a very unique way to identify
the Rouse Simmons and a very unique
historical aspect of the ship.
These are, you can see cargo hatch coamings,
so the hatch covers are gone
from the sinking event.
But there would've been a cargo hatch here,
one here, and there's one up front.
So there's three on the Rouse Simmons.
There were three masts,
and of course as Tammy said,
the masts are all on the lake bottom,
forward of the ship.
But as we approach the stern
you can see the outline right here of the stern cabin.
Of course, it's gone.
It probably got torn off or floated away during the sinking.
And the roof of the cabin would've been
right about there where that aft mast broke off.
So it would've been about that tall.
This apparatus right here,
there is a hand-operated bilge pump
for pumping out the vessel.
And also a winch that operated the aft centerboard,
so that winch was used to raise and lower
the aft centerboard.
Down in here it's a little bit hard to see,
but it will become clearer is a stove
that was used for heating and cooking
in the cabin right here.
This would've been mounts for rigging,
for some of the masts and the sails.
Now the ship's wheel is gone,
but it would've been right here.
And this is the rudder post.
So this is a vertical post that goes all the way down
and the rudder is mounted to that.
And in the sinking event that got pushed up
a little bit, about a foot.
There's some damage here to the stern.
See it's cracked all the way up,
probably from when it struck the lake bottom.
So you can see off in the distance,
even though we're at 165 feet of depth
here to the bottom,
there's still quite a bit of natural sunlight
getting down to the wreck.
'Cause the lights on my camera are only
lighting up about this much of the area,
so the rest of it is natural sunlight.
So here another view of the bilge pump.
And this, if you can make that out right there,
that is the rotating drum on that winch
that would turn,
that they would use to pull up the aft centerboard.
So when the ship was carrying Christmas trees
it would've been filled all the way to the top
underside of the deck,
but because of the degradation in the water,
everything is sunk down quite a bit.
And it is a little bit hard to see the trees.
I'll point some out when they come up.
Here's some trees right here.
You just see them as little sticks,
basically just the trunks are remaining
and a few of the branches.
Below the silt inside the ship
there's still some trees that are intact
with needles still in place.
So here we're starting to be able to see
the windlass at the bottom of the ship
and Tammy talked about that in quite a bit of detail
in her presentation because it gave a lot of clues
to the sinking event.
Of course, we still don't know exactly what happened,
but by judging the position of things at the winch
and the state of the winch,
we can piece together a lot of events
that may have occurred during the sinking.
This board right here that sort of looks
like a random board just sitting there,
that would've been the starboard
running light mount.
So there would've been a lantern mounted right there.
Of course, the bowsprit would've been sticking way off.
The bowsprit, if you look at pictures of this,
was very long.
It was probably at least 30% the height
of one of the masts.
It would've been beautiful to see that.
And this, if you're familiar with sailing ships,
this was the Samson post.
So it's a large, very stout post that went al the way down
to the keel of the ship,
and it could be used for towing the vessel,
for tying up to docks.
It was very heavy-duty.
Used for tying things onto.
This was one of the lines that was left by divers
to attach to the wreck for diving purposes.
It would've been attached to a buoy at the surface.
You can see here during the sinking event
as Tammy talked about,
the lake bottom got scoured out,
so there's quite a depression there.
And of course, here's the anchor chain
that Tammy talked about.
Okay, now we're looking at the windlass.
This is the pile of chain Tammy described.
On the other side is the chain laid out
or faked out back and forth.
There's a little Christmas tree right there.
So what I'm gonna do in the next shot is,
I'm gonna go down into the fo'c'sle deck into the cabin.
This would've been a ladder that led down into the cabin,
but I won't fit through that very well.
I could tell when I was down there.
I'm gonna squeeze through this little opening
that is just to the lower right of the windlass.
Now remember, that's how big I am.
(audience laughter)
I'm gonna try to fit in there.
And so I left a lot of this portion of the video uncut
so you can kind of see the finagling
that I had to do to get in there.
And you'll see that I start to stir up some of the silt.
So here's that windlass in the deck of the ship
and I'm going down,
trying to get my camera in there before me.
You can see the quagga mussels
that Tammy described.
They're all over everything.
There's a few on the bottom.
Now, this is very lightweight silt.
Just the tiniest little stirring of the water,
poof, visibility goes bad.
Now I'm in the cabin.
This is a berth or a bunk
and this is a stove right there.
There's shoes underneath here.
Some blankets on the other side.
Lots of artifacts in there.
Now you can see I worked my way in there
and I'm starting to stir up the silt
and I'm trying to back out now.
And I got stuck.
Not a big deal.
I worked my way out,
but I'm still by myself,
so I went in alone on this dive,
at least initially so I could get good camera shots
without the silt,
so now I'm about 45 minutes or an hour into the dive
and the rest of the gang is coming down now.
So this fellow was on traditional,
regular open circuit scuba,
so you can see he makes bubbles,
the rest of us don't.
So here is the result of me,
even though I was very careful going into the bow,
and so I kind of mucked up the visibility for these guys.
But that's why I went down first,
to try to get good video before everyone else
came around.
I want to comment a little bit about
the swimming technique.
This might appear different to you.
It's not the flutter kick like you're normally
used to seeing.
And this is a cave diving finning technique
that we use so we can swim very close
to things without stirring up the bottom.
So you can see this is Tammy.
She's swimming very close to the wreck,
but her fin wash is going out to the sides
rather than straight down onto the wreck.
So we use that as a special technique
to help reduce the amount of silt
that we stir up as we're swimming.
Okay, now onto the gravy of the presentation.
The Christmas trees.
This is not what they look like on the ship.
I wish it was.
So we're looking down through the openings
in the deck.
This is a pile of Christmas trees here.
See that?
Here's more Christmas trees.
Of course, everything is covered with these quagga mussels.
That's that roughness that you see.
These are all trees here.
They would've been all laid out pointing one direction.
Another pile of trees up near the bow.
So now we start the decompression.
And this is what we do on decompression.
We just come up slowly and we stop
at certain stages.
And my decompression, as I said,
took about 30 minutes.
And basically we just hang out on a line like this.
And that's the end of the dive.
We get out of the water,
hopefully safely, and we're back for another one later on.
I want to point out that if you want more information
on this shipwreck or any other,
you can go to this website,
WisconsinShipwrecks.org.
And you can find information on the shipwrecks, pictures.
Also attractions in the area of shipwrecks.
Lighthouses, things like that.
So please do visit that site if you would like
further information.
With that, I'll end the presentation.
Thank you.
(audience applause)