The XX files

I
don’t care how fast the frickin’ ferry is — it can’t be fast enough for me. LakeOntario is a killer.
I’ve developed a fear of it since learning about the thousands of ships that
have sunk in the Great Lakes. And that’s if the thing makes
it safely out of port. Last week’s accident in NYC proves that even though the
dangers that lured 18th- and 19th-century ships to their doom are reduced now,
boats are still vulnerable to bone-headedness and bad luck.

            Just ask Bill Springer, an imaging
systems engineer in RIT’s School of Photographic
Arts and Sciences. His avocation is
tracking down and getting images of shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. And there
are a lot of them: 6,000 by most counts. One as recently as 1975.

Springer sees
only the upside of downed ships. Along with a group called the Great Lakes
Shipwreck Historical Society, based in a lighthouse on Lake Superior, Springer spends
part of every summer searching for and taking pictures of the nearly 3,000
ships that haven’t been found yet. He uses cutting-edge technology like sonar
and digital video, and he learns about regional history, climatology, and earth
science.

            This summer he’ll be looking for the
British warship Invincible, which sank in Lake Superior in the early
1800s. He’ll use old survey maps to find a likely locale for the ship which,
after two centuries, is covered with silt. Then he and his colleagues will drag
a cesium proton magnometer over the area. “It’s basically a giant magnet,” he
says, similar to the technology the Navy uses to detect enemy subs.

            Once a ship is located, Springer
uses sonar and underwater robots tricked out with digital cameras on loan from National Geographic to document the
wreck. This isn’t always easy, but Springer says he enjoys the challenge of
“taking information in nontraditional form and making images people can use.”

            Last summer, he used new sonar
technology to get images of the Matheson, a 250-foot-long wooden steamship that
was crushed by ice in Lake Superior in 1910. This
involved dragging a silver missile-shaped sidescan sonar device which takes
“acoustical pictures” over the wreck.

            In the Imaging Systems Management
lab at RIT, Springer shows me two-foot-long sepia-toned images of the sunken
Matheson, its wheelhouse shattered and steam stacks knocked asunder. Debris
litters the deck and surrounding lake floor. “These are very high-quality
images,” Springer says. “No one has ever seen this level of detail at this
size.”

            The images are so good, in fact,
that Springer thinks they might have found sunken treasure. “There were rumors
about a safe aboard the Matheson,” he says, excitedly pointing to a blurred
rectangle about 50 feet from the ship. “We believe we found a safe here. At the
time there was a gold rush in Minnesota.”

Divers beware: Like all GreatLake shipwrecks,
the Matheson is protected by state laws. “If you remove any artifact,” Springer
says, “you can do jail time.”

To hear
Springer tell it, the Great Lakes are more
dangerous than the ocean. “Lake wave patterns
are different from ocean patterns,” he says. “Lakes slosh back and forth and
big waves can reflect off other shores nearby.” When two opposing waves meet, he
says, they can snap a boat in two.

            And, Springer says, the Great Lakes’ legendary
gales can sweep from the north without warning, driving waves to heights of 40
feet or more. In the days before GPS and radio communications, this spelled
doom for unprepared ships. Now, at least, ship-to-shore communiqués can warn
captains of heavy weather.

            But what about the Edmund
Fitzgerald, the 729-foot cargo ship that foundered and sank in wild winds and
high seas in 1975? The ship — made famous by the Gordon Lightfoot song —
was in constant radio communication with a nearby vessel, even as towering
waves swept men and equipment from the deck. Modern communications were of no
help; all 29 men aboard were lost.

            Another unappealing Great Lakes feature is
sudden ice formation. That’s what happened to the Matheson. The captain dropped
anchor to weather out a storm and the boat got iced in. As the crew was
scrambling out to safety — possibly leaving behind a safe full of gold —
the ice closed in and crushed the hull.

Springer and
other shipwreck enthusiasts see only one danger in the Great Lakes. For
generations, the lakes’ clear, cold, and salt-free water has preserved ships,
but a new threat lurks: zebra mussels.

            “Some 200-year-old sailing ships are
in such pristine shape they look like you could pull them up and sail them,”
Springer says. “But the zebra mussels covering the lakes could make a sunken
ship look like a coral reef.”

            It’s a race against time. Working
with state grants, Springer and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society
are rushing to find and photograph shipwrecks. He would like to help develop
virtual reality tours through the wrecks, so everyone could enjoy them.

            Although he’s concentrating his
efforts on Lake Superior, Springer hopes to start work on
LakeOntario as soon as
funding is obtained. At the bottom of LakeOntario lie old
airplanes — B-25 bombers flown on WWII training missions, among others — as
well as ships he wants to document.

            As for the fast ferry, Springer
doesn’t think it’s in danger of sinking, but he does concede “they’re sending
that boat into nasty water.” When the ferry — ominously named “Spirit of Ontario” — pulls
out of port, I’ll be the one standing firmly on land waving a little hankie.
Bon voyage!

This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2004.