On June 3, 1981, the Milwaukee based tug EDWARD E. GILLEN capsized and sank 2 ½ miles east of the Hoan Bridge in 70 feet of water while undergoing tests in the tow of the Coast Guard icebreaker WESTWIND. The four man crew of the GILLEN were rescued from Lake Michigan by the WESTWIND and suffered no serious injuries. A lawsuit was filed contending that the officers and crew of the WESTWIND failed to assign sufficient and competent men to monitor and control the exercise, among other things.
The GILLEN was built in 1908 at Buffalo by Cowle’s Ship Building Co. as the ERASTUS C. KNIGHT for Benjamin L. Cowles of Buffalo. She measured 56.5 feet in length, 15.3 feet in beam and a draft of 7.9 feet. She was renamed the AUBREY around 1917 and later the EDWARD E. GILLEN in 1964. This steel tug was the third to carry the GILLEN name.
The GILLEN was never raised and still sits upright on the bottom near the south end of the Hoan Bridge. Her name board is displayed at Milwaukee’s Central Library.
Our Shipwreck Ambassador Cal Kothrade shares his interesting dive stories of the GILLEN as well as some great photos as she sits in Lake Michigan.
During the early spring of 2015, the Lake Michigan waters off Milwaukee enjoyed a brief period of extreme clarity. I only know this because I took advantage of it to capture some incredible images of a wreck I had been wanting to see for quite some time, the EDWARD E. GILLEN.
The GILLEN is a small tug that went down in an accident in 1981 while conducting tow line tests with the USCG. Thankfully all four of its crew were plucked from the 48 degree water without any loss of life. The tiny tug has sat upright in 70 feet of water ever since. It’s location is 2.5 miles east of the harbor and is very close to a wreck I have dove sixty or more times, the Dutch freighter PRINS WILLEM V.
Oddly, given its close proximity to a wreck I dove nearly every other week for years, I had never dove the GILLEN. Part of the reason for this blaring omission in my wreck repertoire, is the fact that charter boats don’t go to the GILLEN very often. Being such a small wreck, only about 56′ long, it doesn’t lend itself to handling a boat full of divers very well. A dive charter with six, eight or even ten divers will turn the small site into a giant cloud of silt in no time, unless they are all well trained and stay off the bottom. Also, a diver can see everything there is to see on this wreck in about ten minutes, maybe fifteen if he really gets curious. Begging the question of what to do with the other forty minutes of air in his tanks, as this dive is so shallow. For this reason, I never managed to be on a boat that went there.
After several years, this unintended omission began to gnaw at me. I decided that I would have a small charter boat take me there as a second dive on the way back from a trip to a deeper wreck earlier in the day. There would only be five or six of us on board, and we were all masters of our own buoyancy, so silt wouldn’t be a problem. The deeper dive earlier in the morning went quite well, and the long boat ride back to the GILLEN was a perfect surface interval to prepare our bodies for one more short dive on the shallow tug, with whatever gas was left in our tanks. After all, I would only need five minutes on the wreck to get some photos. The captain gave us a five minute warning when we were near. After claiming to have arrived over the wreck which strangely had no mooring buoy on it, he told us to all get off his boat and sink to the bottom, where the tug would be waiting for us, and to be quick about it!
Water clarity was quite good and to our surprise the only thing we found on the featureless bottom was a boulder about the size of a VW Beetle automobile. We all swam around in ever widening circles searching for the missing wreck until we were nearly out of breathing gas. It was not the ending to the day I had hoped for, but we all had a hearty laugh at the faux pas made by our charter captain, and continue to laugh about it to this day.
Two years later, having still not made it to the wreck of the little tug, I asked a good friend of ours to give us a ride aboard his small dive boat. It was mid April, water was still cold from the winter, and there were only four of us diving on this trip. None of the other dive boats were even in the water yet as the dive season doesn’t typically start until early May in Milwaukee. We were hoping to catch some good visibility that sometimes occurs in the spring, before longer days begin promoting algae growth.
Immediately after leaving the inner harbor, we could tell the water was clear. It looked fantastic and we had high hopes. But more often than not, I have found that good horizontal visibility underwater does not necessarily translate to good vertical vis. During the summer, thermoclines in the water column can drastically reduce one’s ability to see down, or up as the case may be, through the water, even if you can see for seventy feet sideways.
We parked over the wreck and tied off to the mooring buoy (a good omen), and promptly fell overboard, excited about our pending adventure. As I floated on the surface waiting for my companions, I looked down into the water and to my astonishment, saw the wreck sitting on the bottom seventy feet below. This was going to be stellar visibility. I had never seen the bottom of this part of the lake from the surface before, it is a rare thing. I even managed to capture the shadow of our dive boat on the surface in the same image as the wreck, while kneeling on the bottom of the lake.
The four of us enjoyed our dive immensely, taking our time to inspect and explore every part of the tug and its surroundings. All of us except for Mike, who had managed to leave his weight belt in his car back at the dock. Mike did not realize this critical omission of gear until he was in the water, at the buoy wondering why he was not sinking after purging all the air from his suit and wing. Somehow he managed to pull himself down the line, as he got deeper he became less buoyant, until he arrived at the wreck. None of us were aware of his plight until the post dive briefing aboard the dive boat, where he explained his ordeal, and unwillingness to leave the safety of the line for fear of an uncontrolled ascent, which could be dangerous from this depth. So that is the reason why in nearly all of my photos of the GILLEN, Mike is stoically attached to the mooring line! Ironically we all had another grand laugh thanks to the tiny tug EDWARD E. GILLEN.
Every once in a while I get really lucky and land on a wreck during a respite from murky water, and in the case of my one and only trip to the GILLEN, it was fantastic conditions. This allowed me to capture photos that make me think it can’t get any better, making it that much easier to not feel guilty about not wanting to go back.
Images were created 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.
Photo at top of page: Underwater view of GILLEN from bow with diver. Photo by Cal Kothrade.
Other Photos:
PHOTO CREDIT: Above water are from the Great Lakes Marine Collection of the Milwaukee Public Library and Wisconsin Marine Historical Society. All underwater photos are by Cal Kothrade.
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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.
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Suzette Lopez is the Executive Director of the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society.
