The three-masted schooner LUMBERMAN was caught in a brutal squall in Lake Michigan on April 6, 1893. She capsized and sank about 17 miles southeast of Milwaukee, off Oak Creek. It is said she was thrown on her beams end, filled with water, righted herself and sunk. Luckily the water was only about 65 feet deep where she went down. Captain Orion Vose and her crew took to the rigging as her spars were sticking out of the water and they were rescued three hours later.
The spars of the LUMBERMAN were later removed as they were a hazard to navigation but the rest of her was abandoned. Her wreck was discovered by Dan Johnson in 1983.
She was built at Blendon’s Landing, Mich., on the Grand River, in 1862 and measured 126.5 feet in length and 23.5 feet in beam. She spent her career carrying lumber, bark and shingles. There are no known photos of her above water but … thanks to Cal Kothrade we have some of her underwater. Below is Cal’s story of his LUMBERMAN dive.
The three masted schooner LUMBERMAN had been on the bottom of Lake Michigan for 118 years by the time I dove her for the first time. I had heard stories about this wooden schooner in shallow water and was told she was in good condition. My first dive on the wreck was mid-summer of 2011, and the water was warm. The wreck sits on an all sand bottom in sixty feet, so there is plenty of sunlight, and a diver can stay down for a long time at that depth, especially when warm, sun-kissed water filters all the way down to the bottom.
Visibility was not the best but still good enough to warrant taking lots of pictures and video, and that’s just what I did. I swam from the tie-in at the stern all the way up to the bow above the now mostly missing deck boards. Next, I worked my way back to the stern via the empty cargo hold, swimming past the two centerboard trunks. I finally emerged by the stern post, which still stands proud.
The transom had been pulled off inadvertently by a heavy dive boat a few years earlier, which prompted an artificial anchor point to be placed on the lake bottom some thirty feet off the stern. As I swam up the gently curving hull bottom at the aft keel, I noticed a hanging knee, used for supporting deck beams, still in place. That first meeting was a wonderful and easy dive, helping the wreck to forever be a fond memory for me.
The last time I ever dove this historical ship I had a little help from my DPV (Diver Propulsion Vehicle). It wasn’t that I was getting lazy and no longer felt like kicking my way around the 126 foot wreck, rather, I had brought my underwater scooter with the intent of filming the entire site with my video camera, from the top down position.
I had mounted my small Go-Proesque camera on the nose of my scooter, facing straight down. I asked my fellow divers on the boat that afternoon to give me 15 minutes of alone time on the site before beginning their dives. I was hoping that I could do a couple of passes over the wreck bow to stern before others came down and kicked up the silt, ruining my visibility should it be good.
As it turned out, the vis was not particularly good, maybe 20 feet and the other divers only gave me about six minutes before joining me below. In the end, this was a blessing because I was able to capture a diver near the bow on one of my passes, giving the huge ship some sense of scale.
The video I shot that day was the result of four passes lengthwise over the wreck. I had to stay close to the deck, approximately six feet above it, due to the poor visibility. If I had been able to get further away from the boat, say ten or twelve feet up off the deck, I could have done the full scan of the site in two or three passes at the most. It would have made the upcoming task of pulling individual screen grabs from the video to be stitched together for the mosaic less tedious, but it seems things worth doing are seldom easy.
In the end over two hundred screen grabs were utilized for the final image. Each small pic was blended into the next using photoshop, hand stitching and adjusting to make sure everything connected and lined up perfectly, ultimately producing a single, impossible photo of the entire wreck looking down from above. To my knowledge, this is the only image of this wreck like it in existence.
I am unsure how many times I had the pleasure of diving the LUMBERMAN, but it was at least three dives, perhaps as many as five or six over the years.
A short video taken while swimming through the cargo hold can be viewed at my Youtube page at this link: https://youtu.be/F8DG3h9dGkQ
Still images were taken with a Canon T1-I Rebel DSLR mated to a Canon 10-22mm super-wide rectilinear lens, in an Ikelite housing using natural light and Ikelite DS-161 Movie strobes X2. Post production was performed in Adobe Lightroom. Video shot using an Intova HD camera, natural light, and post production of the frame grabs was performed in Adobe Photoshop.
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Cal Kothrade is the Shipwreck Ambassador of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, a diver, a photographer and an artist. His work can be viewed at www.calsworld.net and a wall of his photos are on display at Milwaukee’s Riverfront Pizzeria.
Photo on top of page:
Stern of the LUMBERMAN photo by Cal Kothrade
Other photos:
