The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society has found the wreck of the freighter Huronton, which went down after a collision on Lake Superior virtually precisely 100 years in the past. 

On October 11, 1923, the 240-foot steel-hulled freighter Huronton was upbound on Lake Superior. Visibility was poor attributable to a mix of fog and forest fireplace smoke. A bigger freighter, the 400-foot Cetus, was approaching on a downbound course. Cetus struck Huronton’s port aspect amidships, penetrating the smaller vessel’s hull. The grasp of Cetus knew properly sufficient to maintain his engines engaged forward, preserving the freighter’s bow within the gap and slowing down flooding. The crew of the Huronton had sufficient time to soundly abandon ship – with one exception, the crew’s bulldog, which was tied up in the direction of the strict. 

According to accounts of the incident, the chief mate, Dick Simpell, jumped again over to the Huronton and rescued the canine earlier than the vessel slipped beneath. The freighter had stayed afloat simply 18 minutes after the collision. 

100 years later, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society and its analysis boat, the R/V David Boyd, noticed the wreck of the Huronton in a sonar survey. The Boyd’s towed sonar noticed a faint sign in a small melancholy on the underside at a depth of 800 ft. The crew got here again to look later and made a cautious move, and so they got here again with a transparent sonar depiction of a wrecked freighter, sitting upright and intact with its hatches clearly seen. 

A later survey with an ROV revealed the ship’s situation in nice element, together with the opening that despatched it down. 

“Finding any shipwreck is exciting. But to think that we’re the first human eyes to look at this vessel 100 years after it sank, not many people have the opportunity to do that,” mentioned GLSHS Executive Director Bruce Lynn.

The society’s mission to seek out and doc Great Lakes wrecks has turn out to be extra essential than ever. Invasive quagga mussels are progressively colonizing and degrading shipwrecks in each one of many Great Lakes apart from Lake Superior, the place they’re nonetheless restricted to essentially the most high-traffic harbors. However, if the mussels proceed their unfold, Lake Superior’s perfectly-preserved wreck websites could possibly be at risk of eventual colonization as properly.