I learned to dive in Tobermory, Canada, the site of Fathom Five National Marine Park in Lake Huron. In this small park, literally dozens of 150-200- year-old shipwrecks lie at the bottom of the lake. In some cases, they are almost stacked on top of each other, a testament to the storms of November that were immortalized by Gordon Lightfoot as he sang about the Edmund Fitzgerald.
But this wreck, the Sweepstakes, has been visited by more people than perhaps any other Great Lakes Shipwreck. It lies in only 20 feet of water in Big Tub Harbor. Today, people snorkel over the ship and visit by glass-bottom boat. The structure has been shored up with steel rebar to keep the vessel intact. The ice in winter damages her hull each year. Scuba divers can no longer penetrate her hull, but when I was a young diver, we used the site for wreck diving classes, teaching young initiates how to run reels and carefully go inside an overhead environment.
I recall an advanced wreck class that I took one winter. The ice had not firmed up, so we did a night dive on the shallow wreck. That would give us almost unlimited time to practice skills. In the pitch blackness of a moonless night, we ran spools of guideline into the vessel and then groped our way out by feel in the blackness. On one particular penetration of the ship, I rested for a moment, hovering just off the bottom. As I continued to swim forward, I was stuck. I could not move forward or back. What could be the issue? While my heart began to race, I thought things through. When I had stopped for a moment and dropped slightly, somehow, I manage to skewer a D-Ring on me harness right over a long rusty nail, sticking up six inches from the large wooden beams. If I had been trying to toss the ring over the spike in a game, I would never have been successful, but here, underwater inside a ship, I had managed to hit the bullseye.
Once I realized what had happened, I was able to carefully rise up and detach myself from the wreck. It was a good lesson learned.
This shot was taken a few years ago when I reunited with some old friends. Stu Seldon and his wife Kelly Rizzo went out to the shallow wreck on a summer Sunday afternoon. We’re all eager technical divers, but we wanted to take a few minutes to enjoy an old classic wreck.
The wreck was a Canadian schooner built in Burlington, Ontario, in 1867. It was damaged off Cove Island, then towed to Big Tub Harbour in Georgian Bay where it sank in September 1885.
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