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| Pristine Steamer Found 86 Years Later |
Six miles offshore of Sheboygan, the Robert C. Pringle hit something. It was the night of July 19, 1922. The 101-foot wooden tugboat sank to the bottom of the lake like a stone. A ship was being towed by the Pringle and her crew scrambled to safety on lifeboats and boarded the towed ship, steaming onto their destination in Ohio.
Until May 10, 86 years later, the Pringle lay undisturbed, blanketed by 300 feet of water. Steve Radovan, a longtime Sheboygan maritime historian, lead a crew of divers through the 38-degree water to the Pringle, capturing video and images of the tugboat, still in pristine condition. The video, surprisingly clear, shows the ship's wheel, bell, massive engine housing and even some cabinet drawers in the captain's quarters.
"It's a beautiful wreck," Bill Prince, who captained the boat that the divers used, told the Wausau Daily Herald. "The intact pilot house, the ship's bell, the ship's wheel...everything's there. It really looks nice."
The Pringle began life as a passenger-carrying steamer on Lake Superior near Ashland in 1903. A year later, Benson Transit purchased if for travel between Milwaukee and St. Joseph, Michigan.
It was operated from 1905 to 1908 for trips between Milwaukee and the suburb of Whitefish Bay by the Pabst Brewing Co. It was purchased by several more owners over the next few years, ending up with the Pringle line in 1918, getting converted to a tugboat along the way.
"The exciting thing about this one is that it's a steamer that was very ornate," Radovan told the Herald. "It was originally in the passenger excursion trade, so it's got a lot of interesting accouterments on it. When the divers went down they said, 'There's a big triple expansion enginge sitting there and there's all gold leaf lettering on it.'"
Divers spent 75 minutes underwater but only seven could be spent with the wreck because of its depth. A mixture of oxygen, helium and air was needed to reach the ship. "This allows them to breathe a mixture that isn't harmful to them," Radovan said. A maximum of 10 minutes could be spend down on the ship. Divers also used carbon dioxide scrubbing rebreathing apparatus and dry suit.
"It's a thrill, it really is," Radovan, 61, said. He has been an avid sunken ship searched since the 1970s.
News reports from 1922 said the Pringle sank 12 miles offshore from Manitowoc. "They were a little bit wrong," Radovan said. "I don't think the sailors knew where they were."
Radovan had been searching for the Pringle for nearly 30 years. Along the way, he found two other wrecked schooners, the Floretta and the Home, both of which went down in the 1800s. A friend of Radovan's, Dan Kadarbek, used sonar equipment to detect a ship in 1993 that Radovan thought was the Mediterranean. It turned out to be the Pringle.
The reason for the ship's sinking remains a mystery for now. Radovan and his divers plan on making more dives to further investigate the wreck. More video will be taken and Radovan hopes to submit it to the Wisconsin Historical Society for consideration of the wreck as a national historic site.
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