St. Ignace, MI to Munising, MI

We only drove three hours to our next campground today because we didn’t want to miss the glass bottom boat shipwreck tour in Munising, MI. After setting up camp, we headed directly to the tour offices. We were just in time to get tickets for the 12:30 tour. It was one of the best tours we have done.

The tour took us to three shipwrecks on Lake Superior near Grand Island, where many shipwrecks have occurred. They told us that, in the last 200 years, roughly 2500 of the over 6000 recorded shipwrecks on the Great Lakes have occurred on Lake Superior, many of them occurring at Whitefish Point (yesterday’s lighthouse). The water is so clear in Lake Superior, you can easily see at least 15 feet down.

They first took us to the wreck of the Bermuda. She sank in 1870, looks like she is just sitting on the bottom of the lake, and is one of the most intact wrecks in the area. Apparently she had a leak when she left port to cross the lake, but then a storm caused her to leak even more. The captain beached her and left 3 crew members on board to continue to pump water out of the hold, but the ship continued to fill and sunk to the bottom of the lake. We could easily see her through the water from the upper decks of the boat, but she was even clearer looking through the clear Plexiglas bottom of our boat. It was about 7 feet below us.

Next, we went around the side of Grand Island and passed the East Channel Lighthouse on our way to the next boat, the Hettler. She sank in 1926 after grounding on a reef in a bad storm. The whole crew escaped leaving half the boat stuck on the reef above the surface of the water while the other half broke off and fell into deeper water. Apparently the sight caused future ship crews to worry about their safety in that area. So, three years later, the other half was dynamited so it would no longer be a visible reminder of the shipwreck. This ship has not been salvaged, so much of the furnishings are still down there, including the bathtub and commode from the captain’s cabin. The anchor is back underwater with the ship after many years in the yard of a local citizen. When he retired, he donated it back to the Underwater Preserve, which preserves and protects the shipwrecks in the Great Lakes areas.

Probably one of the oldest known shipwrecks in the area, the last ship is called the Scow. It was apparently “discovered” by one of the passengers during the tour company’s first season operating glass bottom boat tours. After experts examined it, they decided it was a scow (these were last built in the late 1700s), but could find no historical record of a scow sunk off Grand Island. They surmise it was used for the French fur trade. Though it was about 15 feet below us, we were able to take fairly clear pictures from the upper deck of the boat. If Lake Superior had been calmer, the pictures would have been even clearer.

After almost 2.5 hours of somewhat windy but beautiful mostly clear skies on the boat, we headed to the Miner’s Castle formation on the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. When we got there less than an hour later, the skies were cloudy grey and raining. But, the views of the Miner’s Castle were still gorgeous. We considered going to the Miner’s Falls, but decided we did not want to walk over the a mile in the rain to see them. Instead we went to the beautiful Munising Falls and Horseshoe Falls. We wish we could have gone to all the falls in the Munising area. There were about 15 or so falls within a 10 mile radius of Munising!!!