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A Great Lakes tour guide recently discovered the remains of a 138-year-old shipwreck. Perhaps even more amazing, it is the third time that he has found a sunken vessel.
The shipwreck was discovered near the northernmost tip of the Door County Peninsula in eastern Wisconsin by Matt Olson, a tour guide in Door County. Olson is the owner of Door County Adventure Rafting, a company that gives boat tours of caves, shipwrecks and other landmarks in and around Lake Michigan.
He found the shipwreck after noticing an anomaly on satellite images of an area of Lake Michigan’s Rowleys Bay. Curious, he took a boat to the area and equipped with his diving gear, sonar and a waterproof GoPro camera, he went looking to see what was causing the anomaly.
It turned out that the anomaly was the sunken remains of the Frank D. Barker, which had sunk way back in 1887 en route to Escanaba, Michigan to pick up a load of iron ore. Marine archaeologists at the Wisconsin Historical Society would later verify Olson’s find.
Why did it take 138 years to find the ship?
“It’s over 130 feet long,” Matt Olson told Wisconsin Public Radio. “When I saw how massive the wreck was, I was like, ‘How could no one have come across this at any point in time?’”
Part of the reason for why it took so long to find the sunken remains of the Frank D. Barker is that when it sank, the ship’s captain and its crew ended up on Spider Island. It was actually located under just 24 feet of water, between the ridges of an limestone outcropping known as Barker Shoal – which was probably received that name because of the ship, according to Tamara Thomsen, a maritime archeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society. That limestone outcropping is another reason why it may have taken so long to find the sunken ship as many boaters avoid that area for fear of incurring damage.
“There’s not too many boaters that go out from there, and it’s mainly just fishermen,” Olson said. “So I guess that’s why no one ever came across it.”
In addition to finding the Frank D. Barker, last year, Matt Olsen also found the Grey Eagle, which sunk in 1869. He also helped locate another schooner named Sunshine, which also sank in 1869. The Wisconsin Historical Society is currently planning more expeditions to the Barker.
“It’s like a football field filled with oak,” Thomsen said of Olsen’s latest discovery. “The entire ship is sort of filleted open, and a lot of the deck machinery is still there. It’s just really amazing. It’s almost like looking at a puzzle, because, you know, everything is there. It’s laid out. The sides have split open but you can, in your mind, kind of put it back together.”