Lake Michigan Shipwrecks

State trooper serves and protects shipwrecks, too

When Michigan State Police Trooper Randy Parros suits up for work, sometimes it's with a couple of scuba tanks as he guards the bottom of the Great Lakes against underwater pirates who seek booty from shipwrecks.

"It's become less commonplace now, but for a long time, when these new wrecks would be discovered, there'd be a set of divers who would go out and take things off of them," said Parros, 43, who is stationed at the Detroit post and patrols freeways when he's not on a dive assignment.

Objects on the bottom of the Great Lakes are public property. The state Department of Natural Resources wants to keep them that way. So, in addition to their work recovering evidence and bodies from Michigan waters, and even inspecting bridges for the Department of Transportation, state police divers sometimes are called upon by the DNR to make video recordings of shipwrecks.

The videos guard against theft and also are useful to help researchers identify wrecks.

Parros said items such as a well-known ship's wheel or nameplate can be "pretty valuable on the black market," fetching thousands of dollars. But for the state to retrieve and preserve them would be costly. Plus, it would ruin part of what makes Michigan and its Great Lakes waters so attractive for divers from around the world.

A certified diver before he went to a special school to join the state police team, Parros said his favorite bottom dweller is the Cornelia B. Windiate, lying almost 200 feet below the surface of Lake Huron. The ship got stuck in ice and sank in December 1875 while hauling wheat from Milwaukee to Buffalo, N.Y. What makes the wreck special is its completeness, Parros said, including three upright masts with ropes still tied.

"She sits upright on her bottom. It's almost perfectly intact ... almost like somebody just went and took it and set it down there. It's just absolutely beautiful," Parros said.

Most divers are not thieves, he said. More often, rather than removing objects from wrecks, divers will create a mini-museum underwater with the things they find.

Shipwrecks of Lake Superior | Great Lakes Boating

This simple phrase, spoken into his VHF radiotelephone around 7 p.m. by Capt. Ernest M. McSorley on November 10, 1975, were the last words ever heard from

the crew aboard the Great Lakes steamer Edmund Fitzgerald. Now, 36 years after her tragic loss, the Fitzgerald remains the most famous of all shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, and no one is any closer to determining what caused her loss. Even with modern forensic science, we can only guess what happened that night.

Since the sinking of LaSalle’s Griffon in September, 1679 (the same LaSalle after whom Chicago’s street in the Loop is named) there have been at least 6,000 vessels lost to shipwreck on the Great Lakes, with an estimated loss of 30,000 lives. Those who are serious about boating on the Great Lakes are aware of the potential danger brought on by storms, fog, collision, or mechanical failure. The lesson is that while nature provides the Great Lakes for us to enjoy, the price we pay is constant vigilance—a sensitivity to the hazards that come with these famous inland seas.

Lake Superior is perhaps the least traveled lake among the recreational boating community. The Great Lakes’ largest body of water continues to have a reputation for attracting only the heartiest of sailors—only those with enough time to make the drive so far to the north or those dedicated to true adventure on the water.

Yet many boaters don’t realize that ports such as Duluth, Minn.; Superior, Wis.; Thunder Bay, Ontario; Marquette, and Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., are proud to offer a substantial variety of recreational boating facilities to both cruisers and day-sailors. Isle Royale National Park, nestled on underwater granite mountains in the northwestern part of the lake, attracts a flock of boaters each summer, even given its distance from the mainland. Isle Royale is well known for its population of wolves, moose and foxes—and for its share of shipwrecks, too.

Take, for example, the case of the Canadian 250-foot package freighter Kamloops that was bound for Fort William, Ontario, with a cargo of general goods. She took shelter from the weather behind Whitefish Point on December 5, 1927; when the weather cleared the next day, she headed westbound into the open lake accompanied by fellow steamers Quedoc and Winnepeg. But the weather soon turned deadly again, and the Kamloops was lost with no trace, last seen by the pilothouse crew of the Quedoc wallowing in heavy seas just short of Isle Royale.

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