Watch National Geographic Documentary Featuring Ghost Ships Of Lake Superior
We're coming up on the stormy season on Lake Superior. I was looking through some old shipwreck videos which I find fascinating. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube you can find, but there is a relatively new free documentary available.
Earlier this summer, National Geographic uploaded a 44-minute long documentary about some of the sunken ships on Lake Superior. They followed the Lake Superior Shipwreck Museum as they searched for lost ships.
The dedicated volunteers use mapping equipment to find sunken ships. As one of the guys described it, it's like mowing the lawn, but going across hundreds of miles of water. They can go days without seeing anything. A lot of the time the ships don't even look like shipwrecks.
Once they find the ship, they deploy a submersible to take video and hopefully identify a wreck. In the episode, they were able to successfully identify several lost vessels.
It was commonplace in the early 1900s for steamships to town barges or other unpowered ships behind them. Freight companies could get more bang for their buck. However, it also was more dangerous, especially in bad weather with mighty waves.
That's the case with the C.F. Curtis which was just recently found after last seen 100 years ago.
Using newspaper articles from the late 1800s, they were also able to narrow down the search area for a particular ship highlighted in this episode. The L.R. Doty sank in bad weather in 1899, losing all crew. She was being towed by another vessel when it broke loose and went under. Wreckage traveled so far that it threw off people searching for it. By using the newspaper clippings, shipwreck hunters were able to see that the likely location was much further away than anticipated.
Check out the video below. It's a pretty fascinating look into 100 years ago.