Shoniker is an adventurer
and explorer He remembers sitting around chatting with other divers, planning
expeditions to open up uncharted and longest shipwrecks at the bottom of
Lake Ontario off Kingston One September day in 1995, Shoniker set out to
check some co-ordinates given to him by a friend. Using an echo sounder,
the friend had detected an object on the lake bottom that might be a lost
wreck. Shocker's boat had been chartered by a group of divers from the
Niagara Divers Association so he took them hunting within. What they found
that day would turn out to be, as Shonicker describes it, his "curse."
"We went over and got a recording or blip or wreck, or whatever it was.
So I sent some divers down," recalls Shonicker. "They sent up a lift bag
to indicate they'd found something. As soon as they did that, we all jumped
in. It was the kind of experience divers dream of: To discover a pristine
wreck, its artifacts and hardware-. undisturbed by other divers.
"I guess it's the first time I've been involved in finding a wreck. It
certainly is something, if you run charters or scuba dive; it's like finding
a treasure ship or something."
Though the initial discovery was exciting, the overall experience was a
letdown for Shoniker. He'd found a new wreck, but it wasn't the one he
had anticipated. Shoniker and the Niagara divers had stumbled on the well
preserved tugboat Frontenac. The boat had sunk in a storm in December of
1929, somewhere between Main Duck Island and Pigeon Island.
"The mast is still upright. I've never ~a compass on a wreck, a whistle,
all of the dishes were there," said Shoniker. "But I hadn't heard of [the
Frontenac) before."
Shoniker didn't come to under stand the importance of his discovery until
the next when he flagged down another charter that had Kingston diver and
amateur underwater archeologist Rick Neilson aboard.
"He was very excited about it because he had looked for it for weeks or
months," said Shoniker.
With that chance conversation, Shoniker's plans to open the Frontenac up
as an exciting new Kingston dive site soon changed. Initially, he was reluctant
to reveal the location of the wreck to his charter boat competitors, both
for business reasons and because there were "other guys I just don't like.
Now he faced an added dilemma. Neilson and others convinced Shoniker he
should keep the wreck's co-ordinates a secret to ensure its preservation.
As a charter diving oper-ator, Shoniker knew well the amount of damage
and pilfering that has taken place on Kingston's shipwrecks. He was afraid
of what might happen to the Frontenac - fears that have since become reality
despite his precautions.
Shoniker has taken few charter groups to dive the Frontenac. He checks
equipment bags to make sure -no diver is smuggling a satellite global positioning
handset aboard to secretly plot the Frontenac's co-ordinates.
Still, Shoniker admits "there's been a lot of problems. Every time I go
out there I wish I hadn't." He once dove down to check the Frontenac after
a group had finished their dive and found the compass hidden some distance
from the boat. Shoniker confronted the man who moved it, who claimed he
was hiding it so other divers wouldn't steal it.
Since 1995, the Frontenac's tiller arm cable has broken up because of divers
bumping into it. Shoniker once found a mast running light in the lake bed,
but when he turned it over to inspect it, it disintegrated in his hands.
All this damage has resulted from relatively limited exposure.
Other Kingston divers continue to search for the Frontenac. They have been
pressuring Shoniker to reveal the co-ordinates and share his good fortune.
This year he surprised them all and publicly pledged that he wouldn't take
any more charter groups to the Frontenac - if they drop the issue.
Discovering the Frontenac has brought with it a heavy burden. "The whole
time out there, I'm not enjoying it because I'm afraid someone will see
us. I've never come back from there with a good feeling," says Shoniker.
Diving in the Kingston area has reached a crossroads. The sport is growing
in popularity More and more charter boats ply the waters of Lake Ontario
ferrying thousands of divers each year to Kingston's historic wreck sites.
But at what price to the wrecks.
Charter operator Bruce Cameron has been spearheading a drive to open up'
more wrecks to better promote Kingston as one of the best diving locations
in the world.
"We think the time has come," says Cameron.
His ideas have met resistance, even open hostility; from divers who fear
that he wants to go too far too fast.
"I've seen these guys come and go," says Gary Thibault, president of Preserve
Our W wrecks Kingston. "He's looking at it as a profitable business.
I'm looking at it from the side of a normal diver. I can go down again
and again and again and always see something new."
PRESERVE
OUR WRECKS
The organization's name is its mandate Preserve Our Wrecks, or POW, was
formed in 1980 after a winch was stolen from the schooner barge Aloha.
Area divers, dive shop owners and charter boat operators began unofficially
policing the wrecks.
The organization has paid for and in-stalled mooring lines at 22 wreck
sites so boats can be tied up safely while divers explore below Prior to
the use of the mooring lines, wrecks had been extensively damaged by anchors
being dropped right into them or dragged across them.
Thibault defends Shoniker's right to keep the Frontenac co-ordinates secret.
"POW has no wrecks in reserve. Some individual members do. Some individual
members have spent hours and hours researching and searching on the lake
and they have chosen to keep them a secret," says Thibault. "It's like
having a secret fishing hole. A guy doesn't have to tell if he doesn't
want to. So they have their own little diving domain."
There was an era, from the late 1950s and into the 1970's when all of lake
Ontario around Kingston was Barbara Carson's
domain. Carson is legendary
in local diving circles, having helped find dozens of wrecks through meticulous
research, tenacity and the daring to plunge with fellow explorers
into unknown waters.
A typical picture of Carson with her cousin, Lloyd Shales, another of Kingston's
scuba diving pioneers, appeared in a 1963 edition of The
Whig
Standard.
They
are holding the ship's wheel from the ship City of Sheboygan, which they
had just discovered. That was an era when few people were scuba divers.
There were no regulations restricting what could be hauled up from the
bottom. And there was no concern about damage or wreck stripping, though
both occurred.
"It has advanced," says the soft spoken Carson, now sixty something and
the owner of her own dive boat, which gets plenty of use from May to October
"Our idea was that if anything was recovered it could be placed where every-body
could see it It was the foundation for the display for the Marine Museum
[of the Great Lakes]."
Carson had so much knowledge of Kingston's shipwrecks, and where to find
them, that when Jacques Cousteau's boat Calypso toured the Great Lakes
in 1980, she acted as its guide to many of the local dive sites.
The big difference between the diving world of today and that of 1963,
says Carson, Is "the amount of divers. At that time there weren't any charters."
One of Carson's greatest discoveries came in 1967 when she researched and
helped find the long lost wreck of the schooner George A. Marsh. The ship
was headed from Oswego, N.Y., to Kingston on August 7, 1917, with
a load of coal when it was caught in a fierce wind and rain storm. At
5
a.m. the next day, the boat sank from beneath the 14 passengers and crew,
two miles off Pigeon Island, settling to rest about 25 metres below
the surface of Lake. Ontario. Only two people survived the tragedy; seven
bodies were never recovered.
WATERY
GRAVE
When Carson and her fellow divers found the wreck site, it turned out to
a watery grave for several passengers and crew. Fragmented skeletons lie
just off the wreck in the silty lake bottom. Local charter boat owner Jim
Brandeau says that over the years at least one skull and a bone have
gone missing, possibly stolen by someone as a grim souvenir of their dive.
It's the kind of theft that, 31 years ago, Carson could never have foreseen.
Today, she's glad to be part of Shoniker's small circle of diving ends
whom he trusts to take exploring on the Frontenac. She flatly refuses even
talk about what's on the wreck because "with this group I'm in it's, sort
of, his [Shoniker's wreck]."
Another member of that group
is Rick Neilson who, like Carson two decades ago, probably knows of more
lost wreck sites than anyone else in Kingston. How many has he found but
not reported? "I won't even say" says Neilson. "If I told you the number
of Wrecks, that just adds more fuel for people to be out dragging side
scanners."
Neilson says he finds wrecks by "luck." To officially search for Ontario
wrecks you must have a provincial permit and report the find. "I don't
have a separate permit under my name," Neilson says. "If you're lucky,
you might be diving on a mint wreck. it's a privilege, really"
It's a privilege Neilson is going to keep to himself "The
best way to protect a wreck is to not open it up. I'd like to think
that out on the lake there's some out there in pristine condition."
Neilson disagrees with the argument that opening up more historic wrecks
will enhance, or save from economic ruin, Kingston's diving industry "If
you've already got 22 choices, one more ""wreck isn't going to mean failure
or success of their business. How can you think that this year we have
to open the Frontenac because our business depends on it? It doesn't really:"
Hundreds of underwater wrecks dot the shorelines and bays around Kingston
and the area islands. Many more, like the Front enac, sit in deep waters
far out on Lake Ontario.
The lake's cold waters have preserved the ships' skeletons, some for more
than a century The recent infestation of zebra and quagga mussels. the
scourges of municipal water in-take pipes and fish spawning grounds, have
actually increased visibility in some locations from as low as 1.5 metres
a few years ago to 21 metres or more today. Until the mussels cornpleteley
cover the wrecks located in shallower; diving conditions will be
excellent.
Bruce Cameron also realizes the fragility of Kingston's old wrecks So he
has been spearheading a project to sink a decommissioned Canadian war'
ship in Kingston waters. He's got back mg from Mayor Gary Bennett's office
for the plan, as well as the support of POW All divers agree that a sunken
naval vessel would be a tremendous draw far visiting divers and take pressure
sure off the historic wrecks. That was one reason for sinking the ferry
Wolfe Islander fl in 1985. Now the ferry is one of the biggest diving draws
around Kingston, though sometimes drawing the wrong crowd.
In the summer of 1994, Divercity
charter dive boat operator Brian Taylor found himself in a chase off Kingston
to recover parts of the Wolfe Islander II that had been stolen from right
under his nose.
Taylor had tied his boat to the mooring line that runs to the Wolfe Islander
II 25 metres below. On Taylor's boat was a group of divers from Montreal
preparing to go down when a small inflatable craft pulled up to the second
mooring line.
"We noticed they had a lot of equipment," recalls Taylor, who watched from
a distance. Soon their mission became apparent. "They had air tools. {they
were going down and stealing the brass portholes. They were air hammering,
chiseling the brass windows out of the Wolfe Is-lander" Taylor says.
Taylor used his cellular phone to contact Coast Guard and city police
who both said they had no jurisdiction in the matter Another charter boat
owner, Willy Dempsey chased the quick little inflatable but could barely
keep up.
Eventually, the Ontario Provincial Police dispatched a cruiser to wait
for the thieves to land.
PORTHOLES LOST
"They were met at the boat ramp but the guys threw the stuff overboard
into Kingston harbor so there was no evidence. The portholes were lost,"
says Taylor
As evident by this and other stories, protecting shipwrecks is a next to
impossible task in the wide open waters of Lake Ontario, and despite the
best efforts of POW With that unfortunate fact in mind, Kingston based
archeologist Jo nathan Moore hopes the Frontenac and other wrecks are never
opened for wider public use.
"I'm at the complete opposite end of the spectrum from Bruce [Cameron].
Volume is bad for wrecks," he says.
Moore likes to think that 100 years from now if its location is kept secret,
the Frontenac will still he in mint condition, an important part of Kingston
marine history waiting for future gen generations to discover and explore.
He doesn't consider the Frontenac opened up yet because the co-ordinates
have never become "public knowledge."
"People who find sites and open them up are not willing to undertake the
work to do it properly Who is going to spend the time and money to record
it properly? People want the quick discovery Spencer exerts a certain amount
of control over that site. He influences what they do," said Moore. "I'd
tell [Cameron] to forget about it. I don't see why he has to go to that
site."
Cameron says that if he found the Frontenac - which he hopes to do some
day soon - he would release the co-ordinates to the provincial government
and to Moore, to push them to survey the wreck and come up with a plan
to better protect it and all the other wrecks off Kingston.
"POW is the organization of choice for protection of wrecks, but they do
not have any teeth to protect the wrecks," says Cameron.
He says both the City of Kingston and the provincial government have to
get serious about protection and should dedicate a full-time boat and enforcement
officers to the job.
By protecting the wrecks, Cameron argues, they are also ensuring the survival
of a vital and growing tourism industry
"Jonathan Moore and I,"
he says, "really aren't that far apart."
Shoniker wishes Cameron luck. He hopes Cameron does find the Frontenac
because then he might understand the curse he himself uses with every day
"It's something I brought on myself. Now I know why Rick Neilson and Barbara
Carson keep their mouths shut," says Shoniker
If somebody found it it wouldn't be my decision anymore. Go out and find
it
- and think about what
you'll do next."
You can reach Spencer and Suspence
Charters at 1-613-634-0550
divekingston@hotmail.com
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