For 139 years, the F.J. King haunted Lake Michigan as a rumor.
Fishers said their nets snagged on her bones. A lighthouse keeper swore he saw her masts breach the lake’s surface. Divers searched, and searched again, but always came back from the deep shaking their heads.
The F.J. King became a Midwestern ghost ship: unseen, elusive, taunting.
The mystery grew so big that Neptune’s Dive Club in Green Bay, Wis., offered a $1,000 reward decades ago for her discovery.
And then, on a warm June morning this year, she revealed herself.
On June 28, two hours into a search off Baileys Harbor, Wis., a small fishing town on the Door Peninsula that overlooks Lake Michigan, a sonar screen pulsed with the picture of a schooner.
“We were in disbelief,” Brendon Baillod, the maritime historian who led the search, said in an interview. “We were looking at a perfectly intact schooner lying on the bottom.”
The crew had not set out to find her that afternoon as they went aboard the Shoreline, a tour boat that carries sightseers along the peninsula. The plan was to test a new side-scan sonar with greater capability than the previous one the crew had been using.
The sonar, which was being dragged about 200 feet behind the ship and 75 feet below the surface, emitted waves to map out the dark floor of Lake Michigan. The image it stitched together revealed the unmistakable shape of a 140-foot schooner.
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The post The F.J. King, Lost in 1886, Is Found in the Depths of Lake Michigan appeared first on New York Times.
