- 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)