Bottom Time E-Mail News Archives
July 20, 2012

The lakes are still warm running in the high 70 degree to middle 80 degree surface temperature.  Visibility is running about average for this time of the year in the lakes we have been diving in.

The students from the June class need to contact us and finish your open water dive as we need to send in the paper work for the class. 

The first part of this week 5 of the crew recovered a boat that was in forty five feet in Pelican Lake.  A mechanic was working on an eighteen foot I/O Bayliner boat on a lift.  He did some work on the motor, vented out the compartment, started it up, ran it for awhile, and then when he shut it off it blew up burning it to the water line.  He took it off the lift to tow it to the access behind his 16 foot fishing boat.  As he was pulling it across the lake a big boat came too close and its wake rolled over the boat and sent it to the bottom. He was able to cut the tow rope before it took his boat to the bottom. The call came in on Monday afternoon from the owner. Rick Schmidt and I meet with the mechanic and he took us out to the spot where it went down.  After about 2 hours with the side scan sonar we had few promising hits so we did the grid going the other way and had a very strong hit. We then switched over to the depth finder and it showed up sitting in 45 foot of water with the stern sitting on the bottom and the bow pointing straight up.  Tuesday morning Ryan Tangan, Rick Schmidt, Tom and Tyler Erickson and I recovered the boat.  Here are some pictures of the salvage operation.  Pictures by Rick.  When we got it raised and starting towing it back to shore it came up on plane and made it easy to tow back to shore.

Show where it was burned to the waterline       Loading the boat on trailer at the access                          Group posing by the boat

      

Last Sunday Rick Schmidt, Chris Winter, Mike Hanson, Clayton Schultz, and Seal went to Big Cornmorant to spear fish and were unable to find any.  Wind is the wrong direction to dive where we want to search.

We are still putting details together for the mystery trip and should have things finalized by the 25.

Working out the details to do the Lake Superior trip the weekend after Labor Day so if you are interested let us know so we have a count for getting rooms reserved. 

Here is another video of a wreck that Rick Schmidt dove on in Lake Michigan.   http://youtu.be/9yCXWdXMIpM

 

 

                                                                                       

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