Wisconsin's Underwater Archeology Association found a long-lost ship in 2025. In 2026, members wanted to see if they could do it again.
Normally, the Shoreline is a tourist ship, offering scenic rides for small groups. But on a recent summer weekend, it was deputized for science.
The Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association — a group of ordinary Wisconsinites from different walks of life — spent two days scoping the lakebed for the remains of a downed ship called the Plymouth. 
Roughly a dozen members of the group, which calls itself WUAA, disembarked from Washington Island in Door County. The Shoreline’s captain, Stiles Meredith, volunteered his time to steer the boat.
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On the second day of the search, Lake Michigan was as smooth as glass. It couldn’t have been more different from November 1913, when a blizzard with hurricane-force winds slammed the region. 
“Two hundred sixty people lost their lives in a weekend,” said Ric Mixter, a WUAA member who has spent years researching the effects of that storm. “Twelve ships vanished with all of their crews on board. The Plymouth is one of the few that got a chance to actually tell the story.”
When it went down more than a century ago, a lumber ship called the Plymouth was being tugged from Menominee, Michigan. The crew was inexperienced, and all seven men aboard died.
A few of those bodies later washed ashore. Others were never discovered.
Mixter said a message in a bottle from one of those men — Christopher Keenan — eventually turned up on a beach. Keenan was a U.S. Marshal, and he was assigned to ride the Plymouth because the ship was facing several lawsuits.
Mixter has never been able to forget what that note said.
“‘Goodbye, dear ones. I might see you in heaven. Pray for me. Chris,”‘ Mixter recited. “And at the bottom, he wrote, ‘The lumber company owes me $35, so you can collect it.’”
More than a century later, WUAA’s members pieced together clues, including that message, old newspaper accounts and knowledge about wind patterns. They pointed to a previously unscanned section of Lake Michigan.
That’s where this crew would try to find the Plymouth. 
They have a record of success. Last year, WUAA chartered the Shoreline for the group’s first-ever citizen science shipwreck search. They ended up finding the wreck of the F.J. King, a cargo ship that sank back in 1886.
For most people, joining WUAA costs $20 bucks a year. If you’re a student, it’s free.
“Collectively we are a very eclectic group,” explained Emily Roth, a WUAA member who served as the field work coordinator for the Plymouth search. “We have a shared interest in Great Lakes history.”
To join WUAA, no formal training is required. Some members have backgrounds in history, like Laura Bond, a stay-at-home mom in Mount Pleasant. She has worked in educational programming and led tours of tall ships.
“I’m drawn to the water anyway, whether it be an ocean or a lake,” said Bond, who took her daughter along to help search for the Plymouth. “I’ll actually be going back to school in the fall for my graduate degree, as my kids get older.”
Other members are retirees, like Sharon Cook of Milwaukee. A former lobbyist, Cook became fascinated with shipwrecks and learned how to scuba dive. 
“You have one life,” Cook said while en route to board the Shoreline. “You know, people said you only live once. No, I die once. I’m living every day.”
WUAA President Brendon Baillod said the group leverages the power of “intellectually curious people.” By collecting donations and conducting its own searches, he said WUAA is able fill in gaps left by the limited amount of funding for government-supported maritime archeologists.
Historically, Baillod said there have been two groups of people searching for shipwrecks.
“We had, you know, the old wreck hunters who would keep things secret and try to make these their own private scuba playgrounds,” Baillod said. “And on the other hand, you had the archeologists who were only doing this professionally. And the average person couldn’t participate.”
By getting regular people involved, WUAA turns that model on its head. It’s a way to get Wisconsinites excited about maritime archaeology, said WUAA board member Kevin Cullen.
“In my mind, all science should be citizen science,” said Cullen, who also works as executive director of the Wisconsin Maritime Museum. “If you don’t disseminate it to the public, then the meaning and the importance of that type of science is not preserved.”
While aboard the Shoreline, the group crossed into Michigan waters. Trip leaders carefully dropped two missile-shaped devices into the water.
The machines use side-scan sonar to map the lake bottom. One of the devices is manufactured by a Swedish company called DeepVision. The other was cobbled together by WUAA leaders themselves — they call it the “Wreck Sniffer.”
While they scan, the devices load a picture to a computer screen on the boat’s bow. For hours, the boat crawled along at four miles per hour, while traveling in a grid pattern.
At one point, WUAA leaders thought they might have spotted a chain pattern from a ship’s anchor. But, upon further inspection, Baillod concluded that was nothing more than deposits from a glacier.
“When you see cobble or large rocks, they’re often deposited in a fan-like or in almost a geometrical way by the glacier due to the contours of the bottom of the lake and the general progression of the glacier,” Baillod explained.
Baillod knows a massive wrecked ship like the Plymouth would be hard to miss.
“At 213 feet, there’s no question,” Baillod said of the ship’s size. “It is not an ‘if’ moment. It’s a ‘huzzah!’”
But, after two days on the water, that “huzzah” moment didn’t come.
WUAA concentrated its search in a northern area of Lake Michigan, near an uninhabited land mass called Poverty Island. If the Plymouth had managed to keep its anchor down during the worst of the storm, WUAA’s researchers thought it could have sank thereabouts.
Now, they’re wondering if, during Great Lakes Storm of 1913, the ship ended up drifting. With winds that severe, they know it could have drifted very far.
“They call it the king of storms because of its ferocity and what it did to the towns of Chicago and Cleveland,” Mixter said. “It paralyzed them, knocking everybody out of communication, burying buildings to the third floor in snow.”
After more than a century, WUAA was forced to report that the Plymouths’ final resting place remains a mystery.
Still, WUAA’s citizen scientists got to see other shipwrecks during their expedition.
While they were out searching for the Plymouth, the group traveled over the remains of ships called the Erastus Corning, the Dick Somers and the Roen Derrick Barge No. 93.
The general locations of those wrecks have been known for years. It’s illegal to disturb a shipwreck, but curious scuba divers like to float over them to take a peek.
WUAA discovered that the official coordinates of those wrecks were off. With the help of their sonar technology, the group was able to correct the historical record, and provide Michigan officials with exact points of latitude and longitude.
“We work for the public good,” Baillod said. “We don’t just keep the information to ourselves.”
Likewise, the group shared the results of its Plymouth search with Michigan’s Historic Preservation Office. 
By charting where the Plymouth is not, WUAA gave archeologists more information about where the wrecked schooner could be. 
And that search will continue.
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