They found a perfectly preserved wreck of a schooner from 1891! - video

In the waters of Lake Michigan, in the Great Lakes of North America, the wreck of a wooden schooner from the 19th century, which sank in 1891, was found. It would probably have been a find like many others, were it not for the fact that the vessel was preserved in fantastic condition, with its masts still standing proudly towards the surface.

This stunning discovery was made by wreck explorer Ross Richardson, who was sailing towards South Manitou Island when something extremely interesting appeared on his sonar screen. Richardson recorded the GPS coordinates and returned to the spot a week later to look at his discovery in a little more detail….

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“Sonar showed something rising from the bottom almost 30 metres high. An object like this is always something unusual…” – Richardson wrote on his website.

Unfortunately, the mysterious object was lying on the bottom, at a depth of more than 90 metres, which was beyond the searcher’s capabilities. So he decided to call for backup and called his friend Steve Wimer, a diver and underwater photographer who had the experience and equipment to inspect the potential wreck.

September 30, 2019. Richardson, Wimer and their friend Brent Tompkins, set off together into the waters of Lake Michigan to uncover its next mystery. Armed with a camera, Steve Wimer set off towards the bottom, tasked with documenting the mysterious wreck. When he returned to the surface, what he saw and photographed he described with the words “The best preserved wreck I have ever seen!”.

The search team found the wreck of a small, measuring only about 20 metres, wooden schooner, on the stern of which there was still a lifeboat. Both masts of the 19th century vessel are still proudly sticking out towards the sky, or rather towards the water surface, which the ship once crossed, traversing the waters of the Great Lakes Region.

The men were also very lucky when it came to identifying the wreck. It turned out that at the end of the 19th century it was extremely rare to use steel cables, and this is what they discovered on the wreck. Combined with the distinctive bow design, it was certain that the schooner they found was built in Manitowoc or Milwaukee.

Now all that was needed was to dig through Patrick Labadie’s Great Lakes Maritime Collection archive, which contains data on some 6,000 schooners, and cross-reference the search results with the archives of newspapers published during the era. In this way it was possible to identify the wreck as “W.C. Kimball”, a schooner that went missing in May 1891 with 4 men on board.

Source: foxnews.com