Shipwrecks, mussels and sponges: Chicago has scuba diving history

On a cloudy, 80-degree summer day, I squeezed myself into a full-length rubber wetsuit, pulled a tight hood over my head and shimmied my hands into some thick gloves. Several miles away in Lake Michigan from our starting point in Hammond, Indiana, my fellow scuba divers sweated it out on the boat while waiting to plunge into the water.

In Chicago, the 109-foot Silver Spray is the only shipwreck you can spot from DuSable Lake Shore Drive. The ship ran aground in 1914 at the Morgan Shoals, an ancient reef where many ships have met their end.

An estimated 6,000-10,000 shipwrecks are at the bottom of the Great Lakes, but the largest share lies in Lake Michigan. To see those, you’ll need to get in the water.

“These are archaeological sites that tell us part of the vital history of Chicago’s development,” said Madeline Crispell, curator at the Chicago Maritime Museum.

I recently visited a couple of these so-called archaeological sites. For some, Lake Michigan is a beloved scuba diving destination, specifically because of the shipwrecks, well preserved by the cold, fresh water. While Chicago has a small but robust scuba scene, there’s an even deeper history to this form of diving that goes beyond the wrecks. The world’s largest scuba certification organization traces its roots back to the Chicago suburbs. It turns out, going diving in the Great Lakes prepares you for a lot.

Chicago’s connection to scuba

In the early 1950s, Chicago Park District purchased a pair of Aqua-Lungs, co-invented by Jacques Cousteau about a decade earlier. It was the earliest form of scuba gear. The waters of Lake Michigan were dangerous, and the equipment was meant to assist lifeguards in search-and-rescue operations.

One of the first Chicago lifeguards to try out the Aqua-Lung was Ralph Erickson, a swim instructor at the Northwest Side Portage Park pool. His daughter Karina Erickson said he was given no instruction or training.

“He got in the pool and started swimming with this brand new piece of technology,” she said. “He found that he was now able to be fully neutrally buoyant and didn’t need to come up for air. He thought it was the most incredible thing.”

In the early days, most people became scuba divers for professional reasons, because they were lifeguards, in the Navy or salvaging shipwrecks. But by the 1960s, people started considering scuba just for fun.

Erickson wanted to introduce people to scuba in a safe way. So he wrote one of the first instructional manuals and used it to teach scuba courses in Chicago.

He linked up with another Chicagoan, John Cronin, who sold scuba equipment. The two decided to form a dive instruction organization.

Within a few months, Cronin turned his basement in Niles into the headquarters for what would later become the world’s largest scuba organization. In 1966, they launched the Professional Association of Diving Instructors (PADI), which has certified more than 30 million divers in 186 countries.

Erickson certified a few of those divers himself, including Marianne Preker, owner of the Lakeview neighborhood dive shop Underwater Safaris.

“I think what Ralph and John did is take something and make it available to common, ordinary people to have fun,” Preker said. “PADI was the first organization to have a certification card with your picture on it. That made the whole thing safer.”

Diving in Lake Michigan

Most Midwesterners think of scuba as something done on vacation, perhaps in the warm waters of the Caribbean or off the coast of Florida where you can see coral reefs and colorful fish.

But it turns out Chicago has its own scuba scene. Katie Mika is one of the founders of Chicago Undersea Explorers Society (CUES), a local scuba club with roughly fifty active members. “Half the fun is diving with your friends,” Mika said.

CUES goes on several local dives each summer. I joined them for a wreck dive of two sunken barges off the coast of Hammond, Indiana in July.

Unlike diving in tropical locations, Great Lakes diving requires a full-length wetsuit, tight hood, thick gloves and snug booties. Even in the summer, the water can be about 50 degrees 30 feet below the surface.

Another difference is that dive spots in Lake Michigan aren’t as well established, meaning the makeshift buoy marking a shipwreck can get easily cut by a passing boat.

During my dive, it took the dive master longer than usual to find the first wreck. After several minutes in the water, he tied a mooring line to the sunken Inland Steel barge, so named because the barge sank near the old Inland Steel facility in East Chicago, Indiana. I finally jumped in the water with great relief after sweating in the heat. The water didn’t feel cold.

I swam to the rope and began my descent to the remains of the barge forty feet below. Though I’ve been a certified diver for decades, this was my first time diving in the Great Lakes. The most notable difference was the visibility. In the Caribbean, the best visibility for diving can reach beyond 100 feet. Fellow founding member of the Chicago Undersea Explorers Society, Andria Kessler, said the standards are quite different in Lake Michigan. “A very good visibility day is 15-20 feet, but weather changes and sometimes it’s 5 feet.”

We had poor visibility on our dives, and that can be disorienting, especially for newer divers. Yet despite only being able to see about 5 feet, it was clear that these wrecks have become artificial reefs, supporting a whole ecosystem. I found invasive zebra and quagga mussels covering the wrecks. In addition to seeing a few fish, I also found living sponges the size of a half-dollar coin on our second wreck of the day, the Material Service barge. The barge sank during a violent storm in 1936. 15 crew members lost their lives.

Mika is a marine biologist and said scuba diving gives you a real appreciation for the lake’s ecosystem. “I think it’s really hard to be a scuba diver and not inherently care about the waterways you’re in.”

My dive partner, Ashton Kinsey, a PADI Master Instructor at Underwater Safaris, said sometimes people look down on the diving in Lake Michigan, like it’s not real diving. He remembers going on a scuba trip in Florida where half the divers bailed because they were told the water was only 60 feet of visibility that day.

It takes more work and consideration to dive in Lake Michigan where the water can be cold and murky. But Kinsey said that gives Midwestern divers an edge. “If you’re used to diving in poor visibility, colder temperatures with all the gear … if you can become comfortable here, you can be comfortable wherever.”