When Shipwreck Hunters Explored Lake Michigan, They Made A Startling Discovery In The Deep

Late July 2020, Lake Michigan. A team of seasoned shipwreck seekers are aboard a boat some 20 or so miles from the Wisconsin city of Sheboygan. They’re peering at a monitor that’s sending pictures up from several hundred feet below the lake’s surface. Then they spot something out of the ordinary. Is it just a piece of random junk? Or is it something much, much more exciting? Well, they’re about to find out.

The two men leading this particular expedition were Ken Merryman and Jerry Eliason, both highly experienced on the waters of the Great Lakes. Friendship between the two stretches back many years, and they’d been working together to track down underwater wreckage for more than two decades. It’s a partnership that’s certainly produced many fascinating results during that time.

And both men had high hopes that they’d found something truly significant at the bottom of Lake Michigan on that summer’s day in 2020. They hadn’t chosen the spot to anchor their boat by chance. Plenty of preliminary work had gone into identifying this particular site. The months of painstaking research had included poring over archive materials from the early 20th century.

Some of the material they read was of little help, though. Old reports contradicted each other on key details. But in the end their principal source of information had been old papers from the U.S. Life Saving Service. That was the organization that went on to become the U.S. Coast Guard. And the info its archive put Eliason and Merryman on track to make their amazing discovery in Lake Michigan.

The next step for the two wreck hunters, after their archival research had given them a good idea of where to look, was a little more high-tech. It involved what’s known as side scanning. To do this, you tow a sonar scanner through the water, hitched to your boat. The sound waves create images that can detect if there’s something unusual in the water.