“Rediscovered After Over a Century: The SS Western Reserve Hides Secrets at the Bottom of Lake Superior!”
Great Lakes Shipwreck MuseumThe bow area of the Western Reserve.
GLSHS Director of Marine Operations Darryl Ertel and his brother and First Mate, Dan Ertel, had been searching for the wreck of the Western Reserve for two years. In the summer of 2024, they finally succeeded while conducting scans of Lake Superior.
“We side-scan looking out a half mile per side and we caught an image on our port side,” Darryl Ertel explained. “It was very small looking out that far, but I measured the shadow, and it came up about 40 feet…we went back over the top of the ship and saw that it had cargo hatches, and it looked like it was broken in two, one half on top of the other and each half measured with the side scan 150 feet long… [T]hen we measured the width and it was right on so we knew that we’d found the Western Reserve.”
Great Lakes Shipwreck MuseumOne of the lights on the Western Reserve.
Finally, more than a century after it went down, the doomed ship had been discovered.
“Reaction to the discovery was pure elation,” Corey Adkins of GLSHS told All That’s Interesting. Noting that the ship would be the subject of future study and a documentary, he added, “To see something that has been lost over 132 years brings a lot of pride to our organization.”
Darryl Ertel, however, felt something more than elation. Finding the Western Reserve also gave him an eerie feeling.
“Knowing how the 300-foot Western Reserve was caught in a storm this far from shore made a uneasy feeling in the back of my neck,” he remarked. “[A] squall can come up unexpectedly… anywhere, and anytime.”
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