Are you getting wetter as we sit here?
Well, yeah, because it just keeps coming in over this side.
Yeah. I think we might not be very well inflated.
I am so sorry, ladies.
My pants are wet.
Your pants are very wet.
And that was my first time in Lake Huron in a slowly deflating kayak.
You know that feeling of discovering something new about someone you've loved for
years? Someone who you thought that you knew?
Everything about the places we live can be like that too.
The Great Lakes are imprinted on our identity.
For a lot of us who live in Michigan.
The state touches four of the five Great Lakes,
and many of us have made significant memories in and on and near at least one of the lakes.
But there's still so much to learn about our huge inland seas.
And I remember the first time I came here, I'm flying into Alpena and you are on a
plane, and you can't see the other side of the lake.
And it blew my mind. Like I had no idea the Great Lakes were as big as they are.
I feel like every part of the lakes have like a different identity.
You're listening to Beyond the Shore from Michigan Public.
I'm Rebecca Williams. This is the first of five stories about the Great Lakes.
One story per lake. A snapshot that tells a story about each of the lakes.
A little microcosm of what makes each lake unique.
Chapter one Lake Huron the Great Lakes hold more than 20% of the fresh surface water in
the entire world. If you live here or you've been here,
you've probably gone to the beach.
Maybe you've gone fishing or gotten water up your nose.
But there's so much more to the lakes when you look below.
Like shipwrecks, there are thousands of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
I'm sure you've heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed when the gales of November came early.
That famous ship went down in a massive storm in Lake Superior in 1975,
killing all 29 men aboard.
Each of the Great Lakes has sunken ships, but in Lake Huron there's a place nicknamed
Shipwreck Alley.
Starting route to Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
My coworker, Jody Westrick and I took a road trip north from Ann Arbor to check it out.
And now we're going over the river, which looks like it goes out into Lake Huron.
Yep. That's it out there.
It looks like there's a lot of boats out there today or something.
Or maybe those are some of the the, the little moorings where they mark all the
shipwrecks.
The destination is on your left.
Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
We're here.
Arrived.
Oh my God. Look at all these geese. Don't get too close,
Reb.
We pull into the Sanctuary Museum parking lot in front of a navy blue building,
and we give the geese a lot of space.
If you think of Michigan like the palm of your right hand,
the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is up at the tip of the pointer finger.
It's the very first freshwater marine sanctuary ever designated in the U.S..
One of the uniqueness about marine sanctuary is that we protect America's ocean and Great
Lakes treasures.
Jeff Gray is the sanctuary superintendent.
And those treasures are the coral reefs of Florida Keys or the shipwrecks of Thunder
Bay. They're below the waterline.
And when you come to those places, you don't see them automatically.
Ours is hidden. So we need to do a little more work to connect people to them.
The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary is 4300mi² of protected area in the lake full of
shipwrecks.
Through a historical record, we've we've scoured the archives and we've
found historical evidence that about 200 vessels have sank here through archaeology
and science. We're out searching the lake.
We've located about 100.
And there's still about another hundred to find.
On this warm day in late September.
The surface of Lake Huron is so calm and clear,
it's a perfect day to paddle out to see a shipwreck called the Portland.
It's a two masted schooner that sank in a really bad storm in 1877.
To see it, Jodi and I take a ride out to the lake with Sarah Morrison and Sophie Stewart
with the sanctuary. Sophie Parks the big six wheeled truck in the lot at the edge of the
woods near the beach.
All right, we've got life jackets.
We've got air pumps, we've got paddles.
We've got everything for an adventure.
Always prepared for an adventure.
Okay, we are going to blow some more air into this kayak.
What if it deflates while we're out there?
You know, that's why we got the dry bags.
Throw it in, throw it in.
And that is what we call foreshadowing.
Jodi and I grab a handle on either side of the kayak and start down the wooded path to
the beach. I don't want to drag him in the poison ivy.
Or poison.
Ivy. I think so.
Oh, no.
Right now we are dragging an inflatable kayak down to the shore of Lake Huron.
And it's a tandem kayak.
So Jodi and I will be in this together.
So our fates are intertwined.
We have the beautiful, wide, sandy beach almost entirely to
ourselves. I take off my shoes and I roll up my jeans and wade into the shockingly warm
water with Sarah, Jodi, and Sophie.
It's really so shallow.
Yeah.
Yeah. So when when we say you can walk the majority of the way to the shipwreck,
we're not kidding. A lot of the days this is what would happen is a ship would find
shelter in a bay like the Portland and then be driven further inland because of a storm
resulting in wrecking on the rocks.
Even in safe harbor from the storm.
Wow. Okay, so it was really quite dangerous.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. We have lots of salt water captains who talk about.
It's more they've had more dangerous encounters on the Great Lakes than they have
in salt water.
Okay.
Because of wave patterns out here, the waves don't have a lull in between.
So when you've got waves, they're just going to get hit one after
another after another.
So that causes a lot of problems.
And then around here, the limestone reefs that are so shallow.
Sophie says this area includes the main shipping channel for ships to move between
the lower lakes and the upper lakes.
They would have to go past Thunder Bay.
So it's kind of the natural turning point in Lake Huron.
You've got hundreds of ships going back and forth.
Collisions were a very common thing.
And good weather or poor weather.
Our storms come up very aggressively, as does our fog.
And Lake Huron Can has reported waves up to 30ft high.
Jodi and I get into the kayak really carefully.
We don't want to get our expensive equipment wet, but then just a few minutes after we've
left the beach, everything goes sideways.
Are you getting wetter as we sit here?
Well, yeah, because it just keeps coming in over this side.
Yeah. I think we might not be very well inflated.
I am so sorry, ladies.
My pants are wet.
Your pants are very wet.
Jodi jumps out soaking wet.
So it's on to plan B. Jodi stays on shore and I climb onto Sarah's paddle board and sit
cross-legged on the front while she paddles us out into the lake.
Oh, look at that, sunshine.
Oh, it's so beautiful.
Now I feel like I should be singing to Rebecca.
Like.
Like we're in a gondola, right?
Okay, so now you can see the clear water.
Tons of rocks.
It's so clear. We can see right to the bottom.
Yeah. And the boy is right in front of us.
And these boys not only make it easier to find the shipwreck so you can explore them,
but also you're going to see, like, a yellow tow line on the buoys where
you can easily anchor whether you have a boat or,
you know, a lot of paddle boards and kayaks have those bungee cords you can tie directly
up to it. The Portland is a schooner or former schooner,
I should say. And there was a very bad storm October kind of late 1800s.
And that storm pushed the boat closer and closer to shore so that the rocks actually
did start to tear holes in it, leading to it sinking.
So thankfully, the crew was able to survive.
So often when you're close to shore like that, that is the benefit of being washed
ashore in a storm, but we're getting closer, so hopefully we'll be seeing something in
just a moment. I think it might actually be in.
Oh, there's part of it.
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's so cool.
Oh my gosh. Okay.
Oh, we're literally just directly gets old.
Like I'm looking out in front of you. Rebecca. Do you see that?
Yeah. That's amazing. The thick wooden beams of the Portland emerge below us,
looking like railroad tracks under the water.
And so imagine snorkeling this.
You definitely you know, we always say, please don't touch,
but you can get very, very close to this wreck.
And this is one of the things about Lake Huron with shipwrecks, right? As well that
you have some shallow shipwrecks close to shore.
Yeah. You know, probably in all the Great Lakes we have that.
But you know, us being a marine sanctuary, we highlight our shipwrecks a bit more than
maybe other parts of the Great Lakes.
Where maybe it's more of a word of mouth or, you know,
because there are shipwrecks all over the Great Lakes, but here it is easier to
recreate on them like this.
Look at this. We're just sailing over these huge beams.
Sarah paddles us back to shore.
I get back to the beach and I find Jodi safely on land and drying out.
She told me before that this is her favorite lake.
Every time I come here, I'm always surprised about how clear the
water is, and it just is so.
Well, today it's very calm and peaceful, and I think most of the time when I've been
here, it's been that way.
And it just feels so soothing sitting here listening to the waves come in and looking at
how beautiful it all is.
For her. Like a lot of us, the experience of being at your favorite
great lake. It's not just the lake itself, it's your memories of all the times that
you've spent at the lake before.
Every summer, for as long as I can remember, we would come up with our little pop up
camper and we'd camp at Tawas Point State Park.
I just remember spending days and days and days playing on the beach with my cousins,
laying on the water, screaming like songs we learned in Girl Scouts,
and just having the time of my life.
And those are some of my favorite memories.
And as Sophie Stewart explains, the Great Lakes are especially good at
preserving memories in the form of history.
Lake Huron, obviously is our favorite because of the sanctuary,
but all five of the Great Lakes, the cold, fresh,
deep water is what is preserving those wrecks.
So if you take a wooden shipwreck and sink it in the Atlantic Ocean,
say you're looking at a ship from the 1800s.
There are different microorganisms and creatures in warm,
salty water that will eat wood and deteriorate those shipwrecks a lot faster.
Specifically teredo worms and other things like that.
So we get shipwrecks off the Atlantic coast, where all that's left is the iron fastenings
or cannons or cannonballs or things like that,
because all of the wood has literally been eaten away.
Whereas here those microorganisms and creatures can't survive in cold,
fresh water.
That means these Great Lakes shipwrecks are much more intact.
One that's really famous in Lake Michigan is the Rouse Simmons or the Christmas tree ship.
And that one would carry cargoes of Christmas trees from the U.P.
down to Chicago. And that wreck still has the trunks of the Christmas trees of the last
cargo on board.
Sometimes artifacts disappear from shipwrecks in Lake Huron.
We'll hear where they often end up after this quick break.
This is beyond the shore.
I'm Rebecca Williams. Scuba divers come to Lake Huron from all over to check out these
shipwrecks. And so do maritime archaeologists.
That job is just what it sounds like someone who studies archaeology underwater.
Thunder Bay is really known for having exceptional levels of preservation on its
shipwrecks, so any underwater archaeologist is always excited about coming up to the
Great Lakes. So when the position came available,
I was I jumped on it even though I'd never been to Michigan before.
So my name is Andy Yoxtheimer.
I'm a resource protection specialist at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. So I'm
from Reno, Nevada. So I grew up close to Lake Tahoe and I thought Lake Tahoe was a big
lake. And I remember the first time I came here,
I flying into Alpena and you are on a plane and you can't see the other side of the lake.
And it blew my mind. Like, I had no idea the Great Lakes were as big as
they are. It's also really cool interacting with the Great Lakes and the people here.
They have such a strong connection to the water and connection to the lake.
Whichever lake they're on, I feel like every part of the lakes have,
like a different identity.
Lake Huron is definitely it feels a little bit more.
It feels a little quieter, a little bit more wild.
We're meeting up with Andy on a research boat that's tied to a dock at the Marina.
Early the next morning, she's about to go do something called
multibeam mapping.
And what it does is it sends sound down into the water column.
And then basically like echolocation, how long it takes for that sound to reach our
boat again. That'll tell us water depth.
And we use that to get really high definition maps of the sanctuary.
We protect submerged cultural resources.
So we're always looking for more shipwrecks. So that's something that we're always keeping
an eye out for on the maps as well.
Andy says a lot of shipwrecks they haven't found yet are probably in the deeper waters
of the bay. She says even though shipwrecks have a better shot at surviving in the Great
Lakes, there are some challenges.
Ice can be a large issue for our really shallow shipwrecks.
We call it fillet of schooner because all of our shallow shipwrecks are quite broken down.
Also, we deal a lot with zebra and quagga mussels.
Those have become a huge issue in the Great Lakes.
Most of our shipwrecks have are covered in mussels.
But then another factor that we're always looking at is the human interaction with
shipwrecks. We want people to dive them.
We want people to be on these shipwrecks.
We want them to see them.
So we really feel that like until you can see something,
you're not going to want to protect it. So we want people to interact with these sites. We
want them to have a personal connection.
Of course, the flip side of that is, you know,
the more people you're allowing onto sites, unfortunately,
the more likely it is that some artifacts are going to disappear.
How can you get the artifacts back?
Unfortunately, a lot of times they end up on like Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist.
So I know recently some of our the timbers from one of our shipwrecks were recently
recovered because someone had tried to sell them on Facebook Marketplace.
So yeah, it's a constant struggle trying to find these artifacts again.
And unfortunately, a lot of them are not recovered.
The team at Thunder Bay is also collecting water samples that they send to Reagan
Herrera. She's a research ecologist at the Great Lakes Environmental Research
Laboratory. We lovingly call the instrument Richard.
Just to make it easy and fun within the lab when we're doing our measurements,
because short wise, it's DIC.
Because it's dissolved inorganic carbon.
Yep. Got it. Exactly. So that's why we were like,
we can't really put that right.
That acronym might not be great.
So let's call him Richard.
Reagan and her team are using Richard to study freshwater acidification in Lake Huron.
It's a process related to our changing climate,
and it's something that scientists think might affect the shipwrecks.
Within the atmosphere.
Co2 in particular is increasing and that increase has to go somewhere.
I can stay in the atmosphere, or it can go into different bodies of water
that become a sink for it.
You've probably heard of things like corals having issues creating their backbone
structure because of the acidification we're seeing in the oceans.
Well, freshwater also the same equation applies.
She says there's not a lot of research yet about what's happening with freshwater
acidification in Lake Huron and how that might affect the shipwrecks.
We don't really know how that might then lead to potential stress or deterioration of those
heritage sites. On top of that, there's not a lot of work or research looking
into how acidification could impact wood or metal structures that have been underwater.
One of the great reasons we have these wonderful sites is because it's cold and it's
stable where they're located.
But if those environmental conditions start to change,
it could also change how they're preserved.
So what I do is I read the tilt of the buoy, and it tells me which way the wind will blow
the boat over the wreck.
Okay. So, J-Roc. Okay.
Right here.
Yes, sir. Yeah, I'm gonna go.
I'm gonna go around and then come back.
Okay. I'm gonna go starboard.
Yeah. All right. It's gonna be starboard.
Starboard grip. I'm going to go low and go around and then come back and get blown onto
it. Roger.
That's captain Matt Southwell with his deckhand and friend John Lacrosse,
who goes by the nickname J-Roc.
Captain Matt is at the helm of the Lady Michigan.
It's a glass bottomed boat that visits some of the shipwrecks a little farther out from
shore. Jody and I joined him for a tour before we head home.
My name is Captain Matt.
I am your captain today.
Captain Matt grew up up here.
I've been diving these wrecks since I was a kid, so I've always been in love with the
wrecks and our shipwreck history.
He says he started diving on a wreck called the Shamrock outside his aunt and uncle's
house when he was nine.
And then when we hit it, it was like, oh, what is that in front of me?
You know, it spooked, it spooks you.
It really does. The first time when you're I don't know if it does that to everybody,
but it kind of creeps you out because it used to be a living,
working vessel, you know, and you automatically think people died on
this even though no one died on that wreck at all.
But before he was a captain, he went to Hollywood.
Back at my old life, I lived in Hollywood.
Yeah. And I was an actor.
I was in a couple of TV shows.
There's only three reasons a person gets rid of a vehicle. One,
they sell it. Two, they ruin it in order to bilk the insurance company,
or three, they destroy it to hide something.
What do you think my son is trying to hide?
I better find that jeep, Mr.
Evans.
And really, when I left the music business and the acting profession and moved back from
Hollywood to here. I knew I had to do something that had the same amount of passion
that I had for that stuff in the arts and the lake and the wrecks is definitely where my
passion lies. And this job was the corridor toward that.
But he says being a captain is still a dangerous job.
Being a captain on the Great Lakes is you have to respect them.
You have to understand that these are inland seas and can turn ordinary real quick.
There's a reason there's wrecks out here. These lakes have to be respected.
They're extremely dangerous.
When I worked in the Arctic, the thing that shocked me the most was some
of these preeminent oceanographers.
Like what? They get 20 foot waves on the Great Lakes.
I'm like, are you out of your mind? I got two words for you,
Edmund Fitzgerald. Man.
Out here, the weather can change the drop of a hat.
Even mild weather affects how Captain Matt guides the Lady Michigan on tours.
He and his crew have to monitor slight wind and wave changes to make sure the passengers
will be able to see the wrecks through the boat's transparent bottom.
The wrecks and learn. The history is, I think,
huge to people because it lets them know where they came from. And if you don't know
where you came from, how do you know where you're going?
Give yourself a pat on the back because you just survived Shipwreck Alley.
Thank goodness.
There are still about a hundred shipwrecks that remain hidden in the depths here in
Shipwreck Alley in Thunder Bay.
Despite all the explorers, researchers, and even former Hollywood actors
who spend their days devoted to their preservation and discovery,
in a lot of ways, the Great Lakes really are like our loved ones who remain partial
mysteries to us. To know them better, to understand their pasts.
We just have to stay close and keep digging.
Next time on Beyond the Shore, Michigan Public's Dustin Dwyer takes us
surfing on Lake Michigan.
It was mostly surfer in Florida.
And you came up here. And what did you think when people first mentioned that you could
surf out here.
I thought they were kind of stupid, honestly. It looked it looked really bad, and
I thought, no way they're having fun out there. But they definitely are.
So we'll hear why surfers are especially drawn to Lake Michigan.
Jodi Westrick and I reported and produced this episode.
Vincent Duffy was our main editor.
Dustin Dwyer and Jodi Westrick also contributed edits.
Special thanks to Meredith Leoniak and Randy cast.
Support for the production of this podcast was made possible by the Charles Stewart Mott
Foundation as part of its Great Lakes News Collaborative.
Music by blue Dot sessions.
I'm Rebecca Williams. Beyond the shore is a production of Michigan Public.
You can find all of our podcasts at Michigan public.org slash.