Rick Krueger, a veteran diver who spends time on the surface in his 17-foot boat using sonar, a remote-control video camera and a GPS mapping system to chart thousands of underwater objects.
Krueger has already plotted more than 2,500 objects — including boats, fishing shanties, ladders, rock piles, a gas grill, a sailboat rudder and a shopping cart.
Krueger’s database is the best underwater inventory there is for the lakes, said Tamara Thomsen, state historical society maritime archaeologist. A grant will allow Thomsen and Krueger to work on an official catalog of historically significant sunken watercraft including the excursion boats that carried tourists many years ago.
Krueger regularly finds puzzles to solve — like hunks of an old dredging barge strung out in a straight line along miles of Lake Monona’s bottom. He thinks maybe the dredging crew finished deepening a channel and then took their vessel and its big clawed arm apart piece by piece on their way back to shore.
For Krueger, a 63-year-old retired police radio technician, history and fishing are inextricably intertwined.
In addition to sunken barges and boats, he charts positions of tree stumps and anything else that might suggest a good fishing spot. He speaks at outdoors expos and sells packages of GPS coordinates to fishing enthusiasts. It keeps him in gas money.
In 2003 he used a metal detector to find a $20,000 Rolex that had broken off a boater’s wrist and hidden in weeds 10 feet below the surface of Lake Monona.
Divers have found TVs and stereos, a cannon ball, parking meters and stolen cash boxes. About 200 yards north of James Madison Park in Lake Mendota, discarded bottles are piled up, possibly by workers at an old bottling company.
The underwater laboratory Habitat lies off Picnic Point with two cars and a speedboat. Hundreds of anchors can be found, especially off Governor’s Island.
This is WI?
ReplyDeleteI believe so, yes
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