- There's a lot of Wisconsin history
connected to the Great Lakes.
But most of it deals with ships on the water
or the towns along the coast.
Tamara Thomsen and her team
are interested in the lake's hidden history.
Shipwrecks resting on the bottom,
hundreds of feet below the waves.
- It's more than just a pile of wood on the bottom.
- Tamara is a maritime archeologist
with the Wisconsin Historical Society
- This particular shipwreck is broken up.
It's sort of fileted open.
- This is the I-A Johnson,
a scow schooner that sank in 1890
a few miles off the coast of Sheboygan.
It hit another ship in the middle of the night,
broke apart and sank while being towed back to shore.
- It's absolutely lovely shipwreck.
We don't know much about scow schooners.
- No one died and the cargo was food and supplies.
As shipwreck stories go, it's pretty mild.
But don't tell that to Tamara.
- [chuckling] I have not found a boring shipwreck yet.
[splash]
- Her team has a week of dives planned,
but don't look for any artifacts to show up in a museum.
- We don't collect.
- What we do is we collect information.
There's not a lot that's understood
about how these ships were built
especially the ones that were constructed early.
A lot of those construction techniques
were based on apprenticeships.
So you learned how to build the ships.
And then you started developing your own ideas
on how to make them, how to construct them.
- Tamara has spent more than 15 years
diving for the State Historical Society,
but this is more than just a job.
- That's right.
It's 90 degrees out.
I'm dressing for 40.
[splash]
I just love working underwater.
I love being underwater.
- She first wanted to dive in high school.
- I begged my father.
I said, "Can we please take scuba diving lessons?"
And he would say, "Next year, next year, next year, next year."
And it never happened.
When I came to school at the University of Wisconsin,
it was offered as a class. [bubbling]
- Ironically, after Tamara learned to dive,
her father did the same.
And they were able to enjoy the sport together.
She dives year-round.
When the Great Lakes are too cold,
there's always cave diving in Mexico
or even lead mine diving in southwest Wisconsin.
- It's very peaceful.
You can't talk.
You're not listening to the radio
or being distracted by a million different things.
You're just there.
And you're just sort of in your own world.
Sort of my way of checking out from the normal world, I guess.
And being able to relax
and really find peace.
- She first started volunteering with the Historical Society
and they offered her a job.
She found there's no shortage of shipwrecks to explore.
- In Wisconsin waters, we have catalogued 752 vessels.
[splash]
- Not all of them can be reached by diving.
- If you can get any kind of imagery
or if you can drop down
so that we can get some measurements on them.
- Yup.
- Tamara and a crew are using a remotely-operated vehicle
to visit the Thomas Friant,
which sank in 1924 in Lake Superior.
- There it is.
So you can see it says Thomas Friant,
which is really cool.
Certainly on the Great Lakes, we are --
we're not going to find any gold
The thing of most value
is understanding the people who worked there
and sometimes lost their lives there.
What we saw on the Thomas Friant was a lot of fishing equipment.
Fishing equipment from the 1920s.
So for what they would use on a gill netter.
Where they put the doors.
How they operated the equipment.
All of that we were able to understand
or learn from the video that we collected.
- Tamara says the history underwater
can help the history above water.
- If you look at every individual shipwreck,
every one is representative of sort of this timeline
of commercial use of our waterways.
We're starting to get to a point
where we've seen enough of the collection of vessels
that we have in our museum under the water,
that we're able to start putting the story together.
- As much as the ROV helps,
there's nothing like seeing a wreck in person.
- Oh my goodness.
It's new every time. It's great.
Even the old shipwrecks that I've seen before,
I see something new every time I go there.
I'm still learning every day.
And I still love it
every day that I can get out on the water.