Diving the deep wrecks

During the winter months, Bay View resident Jitka Hanakova works as a business analyst. But from April to October, she takes scuba divers to some of the deepest, least accessible shipwrecks on the Great Lakes.

Hanakova started diving in 2000 and quickly fell in love with the sport. She found a good, local charter boat operator in Jerry Guyer and started exploring area shipwrecks. In 2004 she got her captain’s license and worked on Guyer’s boat as a captain. In 2008, she bought her own boat and started her own charter business, Shipwreck Explorers, with Chicago partner Lubo Valuch. 

Shipwreck Explorers specializes in technical diving-going down deeper and staying down longer than recreational diving.

“With time,” Hanakova said, “I realized I’d like to go see some other shipwrecks and I took more advanced courses. I took decompression procedures, advanced nitrox, and trimix. Trimix is when we use helium. So when we go down, let’s say 200 feet, or 300 feet, we don’t get all narced out of our minds.”

Technical diving involves breathing air mixtures different than the atmosphere, depending on how deep a dive is planned. Trimix includes oxygen, nitrogen, and helium. By reducing the proportions of both nitrogen and oxygen, the helium reduces the risk of nitrogen narcosis and oxygen toxicity.

But divers returning from the depths still can’t come up all at once or they risk decompression sickness-the bends. That’s why technical divers return to the surface slowly and in stages.

“That’s the difference between recreational and technical,” she said. “Recreational, if something goes really wrong, theoretically the person could make a controlled assent.”

One of the deep Lake Michigan shipwrecks Hanakova has explored, the Tennie and Laura, lies off Port Washington under 310 feet of water and can only be reached on a technical dive.

With the risks come rewards-like being one of a select few to see a schooner built in 1876 sitting on the lake bottom since it sank in 1903.

“The Tennie and Laura has a beautiful mast still standing upright with the crow’s nest on top of it, and you just don’t see that very often. We’ve got to make sure we preserve it,” Hanakova said.

Part of shipwreck preservation is preventing wrecks from further damage caused by other explorers. The coordinates of many wrecks are known, and divers tie lines onto them to help find their way to and from the wreck in the water. Oft-visited wrecks may have a permanent line, so divers are not hooking the same wreck over and over, causing irrevocable damage.

Last June, diver Phil Patz was tasked with tying a small line around the Tennie and Laura’s bow, so Hanakova’s team could use it to attach a permanent line later. Patz died in the water.

“He attached the smaller line to the bow like we asked him and then he sent a lift bag up. And we saw all that happen and we were really happy. Everything was going according to the plan,” Hanakova said. “But when he was going up, back to the surface, with his decompression stops, something just happened with his rebreather, we really don’t know what, but he just never came back up.”

Hanakova returned to the Tennie and Laura last September and her team successfully installed the permanent line. They were a day ahead of schedule, so Hanakova decided to investigate a wreck with known coordinates but an unknown identity.

Twenty years ago, Hanakova said, visibility for divers at this wreck was only two feet. However, the subsequent invasion of zebra and quagga mussels, which filter the water, has cleared the visibility to 100 feet.

She said 20 years ago, “They couldn’t tell what it was. They thought it may have been a schooner. But that was just about all the information we had. That it was a broken-up schooner. Well, we sent a diver down. The diver comes up and says, ‘This schooner has a propeller. It’s not a schooner!’”

Hanakova contacted shipwreck historian Brendon Baillod with the ship’s description and, coincidentally, he was just researching a vessel that fit its description. By two peculiar-looking posts amidships, Baillod identified it as the M.H. Stewart, a “rabbit steamer” once used to carry lumber, and possibly contraband, across Lake Michigan. Built 1921 in Sturgeon Bay and homeported in Milwaukee, it was scuttled in 1948.

Hanakova will speak about her experience diving the sunken schooner Tennie and Laura at the Ghost Ships Festival, March 5-6 at the Wyndham Milwaukee Airport and Convention Center.

“Brendon will be covering the history of it. I will be covering the diving part. How we dove it, and what it takes to dive a shipwreck, the technical aspect of it, and maybe talk a little about the experience, the unfortunate accident that happened,” Hanakova said. “We want to do it a little bit as a memorial to Phil Patz.”

More info: shipwreckexplorers.com, maritimetrails.org, ghost-ships.org.