So I'm the co-founder of the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association.

We founded the organization in 2000, and we're dedicated to researching, searching for shipwrecks and sharing the results of our work with the public.

And we go out and search for shipwrecks and document them.

And we've been doing this for about 25 years.

Our latest discovery was the steamship SS Milwaukee Lost in 1886.

It was traveling from Muskegon to Chicago another ship was traveling from Chicago to Muskegon.

And they were both.

So on course that they met in the middle of the lake at about midnight the other ship, the Hickox, survived and the Milwaukee went to the bottom.

we were running the lines, towing the sonar behind our boat, and because we were running the sonar, so, so deeply, we had about a thousand feet of line out behind our boat.

And when you have a thousand feet of line out, you can't just turn the boat and go to the next line.

You have to do kind of a keyhole turn.

that's when we ran over the Milwaukee, when we were doing that odd keyhole turn as opposed to just our general U-turn.

Most of the bottom here is sand.

when we see a ship, we can tell it's, you know, it's got straight lines.

A lot of times we can see detail masts, things like that, depending on how you hit it.

difficult to describe the feeling that you get when you actually run over a shipwreck.

It's, it's very hard to describe, but it is just awesome.

Awesome.

it's the 4th of July and New Year's Eve all rolled into one.

It's just I mean, it's just it's exactly what you've been working for for sometimes years.

That shadow on that screen makes your week.

Makes your month.

It's just great.

Shipwrecks are really the byproduct of the settlement of this region along the lakeshore.

There were quite a few accidents, and many of these ships have never been discovered and they have stories to tell.

I'm a I'm a researcher.

Most of our folks are divers and I am not.

I stay above the water and I, like to crawl around the old archives and libraries and museums and things like that, looking for those little pieces of information that might narrow down the area that we have to search.

So we've been working with the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association for quite some time.

They are a group of very dedicated avocation, all underwater explorers, and they have done a lot of research historically used our collection for that as well as a variety of other other things.

And then they are taking boats out and actively looking underwater for shipwrecks.

You know, we're living in the age of information now.

We can come to an institution like the Michigan Maritime Museum.

We can go to libraries, we can look at microfilm for every newspaper that's ever been published.

in working with the Michigan Shipwreck Research Association, they can do the research the museum can't do because we don't have a research branch for the museum, and then we're able to work with them and display or they come and do lectures about their research.

So it's a way for us to be able to provide them a space to share the information directly with the public, whether that's an exhibit, a lecture, a book, anything like that.

I enjoy the the, the challenge of finding those little arcane snippets of information that might help when we're looking for a shipwreck.

We always have a target in mind.

There are not that many ships out in the lake and so we always do the research.

We try to find a specific ship.

It's it's a process almost of elimination.

You look at snippets of information from one source, from another source, from a third source, You put the information together.

You talk to your fellow researchers And we all come together and we kind of just put a put a finger on the map and say, I think it's right there.

if we have the consensus of the the other folks in the group, that's where we'll start our search.

we've been surprised and we've found and I'll turn it to ship.

In the course of looking for what we're looking for.

gosh, we've discovered about five ships that way.

They were undocumented ships.

We didn't know they were going to be there, so they were surprise discoveries.

We have a annual shipwreck show in downtown Holland.

We invite all sorts of other shipwreck hunters and shipwreck finders to provide their information.

And we provide information to the audience about the shipwreck that we've found.

So we try to get as much information as we can out to the public as quickly as we can, because it's a lot of folks are very interested in this stuff.

what's very important to our group is outreach sharing these stories with the public, exciting them about history through discoveries.

I think we have more shipwrecks per square mile of coastline than anywhere in the world.

The Great Lakes can be a pretty intriguing place if you are a shipwreck lover.

So the Michigan Maritime Museum doesn't tell only shipwreck stories of course, but that is certainly very fascinating.

And those boats and the history of those boats, what they went through, what the Great Lakes is like weather wise, which causes a lot of shipwrecks, can be part of that whole story.

the overall goal was really to solve mysteries.

That's really very exciting for us to be the first people to see and document a shipwreck.

The very exciting, but it's beyond just for our own interest.

It's about reaching the public and getting the public excited about our maritime history.

Oftentimes it takes a shipwreck discovery to ignite the interest of the public.