Shipwreck discovery?

[LKunze]

Here is the text for the link Bob posted above.

Divers investigate mystery shipwreck
WILL ASHENMACHER, Duluth News Tribune
Published Sunday, February 25, 2007
Members of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society couldn’t positively identify the Park Point shipwreck Saturday, but they weren’t disappointed.

The chance to scuba dive around a little-known wreck in winter was a rare opportunity the group made the most of.

The group left the Wyoming, Minn., home of member Mike Stitch at 7:30 a.m. Saturday and spent two hours hauling canvas ice houses, ropes, portable heaters and diving gear across pressure ridges and pools of boot-sucking slush to reach the wreck. They had Doritos and Krispy Kreme doughnuts on hand for refueling.

The five divers each spent between 20 and 30 minutes in Lake Superior, taking measurements and photographs.

Preservation Society President Steve Daniel was the first in the water, albeit unintentionally. He fell waist-deep into the lake when he stepped on the partially-frozen-over hole above the wreck that other divers had carved earlier in the week.

“Can we maybe mark the corners a little better?” he asked, before heading back to change into dry clothes.

Five divers from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society braved Lake Superior’s icy waters Saturday to explore the unidentified shipwreck off Park Point.

They were looking for details that might give a clue to the wreck’s identity. The scuba divers did answer a few questions, but also stirred up some more.

The wreck, which is only partially complete and lies on its right side about 10 feet under water, was discovered Feb. 18 by people walking on the clear sheet of ice above.

Mike Stitch of Wyoming, Minn., and Pat Brinkman of Somerset, Wis., took a metal detector with them down to the lake bottom to look for and mark more metal pieces of the wreck that might be buried beneath the sand.

They said they got plenty of hits, but they don’t know what the metal pieces are. The ideal would be to find parts of machinery with serial numbers or trademarks that could date the wreck, but pieces of wood with metal spikes or screws are more likely.

“It’s hard to tell — it could be spikes, it could be a metal band, we don’t know,” Brinkman said after surfacing.

One area was particularly intriguing to Stitch.

“It could be something bigger than wood [with metal spikes] near the bow, where the motor would’ve been,” Stitch said. “There was some major metal underground.”

Ken Merryman of Minneapolis said he thinks the metal object might be boiler material. But the wreck’s engine appears to have been salvaged. Merryman speculated that the boiler material wasn’t worth salvaging. The prop is broken off cleanly, but doesn’t appear to have been burned off with a torch.

Preservation Society President Steve Daniel of Woodbury, Minn., and his son, Duluthian Corey Daniel, dove to measure the wreck’s dimensions.

Merryman recorded the site as being 35 feet long from the exposed propeller to the area where the metal detector stopped registering anything. Although the wreck is only a part of a ship, it still indicates to Merryman that whatever the wreck is, it’s probably not the 80-foot tug B.B. Inman, which previously was the leading candidate.

“We still don’t know what it is,” Merryman said. “But it would seem to me that it’s not the Inman.”

Superior Scuba Center owner Jay Hanson, who was on hand Saturday and had explored the wreck earlier this week, said he now wonders if it’s the tug Sara Smith. Other candidates suggested by ship buffs include the tug E.T. Carrington, the barge Oden and the passenger vessel Searchlight.