Thunder Bay shipwreck sanctuary

The ledger is unusually good, because the preserve made it official. Michigan designated the Thunder Bay Underwater Preserve in 1981 — the first of eleven created under the state's Bottomlands Act — and NOAA established the national marine sanctuary on June 22, 2000, the thirteenth in the system and the first on the Great Lakes. A 2014 expansion brought it to 4,300 square miles. Roughly 116 wrecks are documented; the estimated count in the bay runs toward two hundred, the rest still unmapped.

The collection spans the whole industrial history of the lakes: wooden side-wheel steamers, sailing schooners, and an unusual number of steel propeller-driven freighters from the 1880–1920 transition years — ships carrying lumber, grain, iron ore, coal, and passengers to and from the lumber port of Alpena. The Pewabic itself is listed on the National Register, lying in 170 feet of water where the record says the Meteor left it.

The bay's name predates the tally. Local tradition attributes it to Native accounts of the storms — the thunder the Ojibwa and earlier peoples heard in these squalls was old long before the first schooner logged it. Alpena grew into a lumber port on the back of that traffic, which means the town and the graveyard are the same ledger kept two ways.

The reports are what a file like this generates: divers' accounts of figures at the wrecks, unexplained lights on the water, shapes along the Alpena shore that locals attribute to drowned sailors. The file names the collective plainly — the sailors. Thunder Bay has been marketing itself to recreational divers for decades, and a diver who has seen a hundred ships on the bottom does not need much encouragement to file a sighting.

None of the claims have attached themselves to a single wreck the way the Pewabic attached itself to the bottom, which is probably how it should be: a bay that could kill thirty-five people on a calm evening in August does not need embellishment.

The Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center in Alpena tells the wrecks' stories on dry land, and the sanctuary is open to divers, snorkelers, and kayakers over the shallower sites. The dead stay where the lake put them — state and federal law now make sure of it. Lake Huron's cold freshwater has kept the wrecks unusually intact, which is why divers can still read the names off hundred-and-fifty-year-old hulls, and why the bay's tally keeps the quality of an archive rather than a rumor.