It's a surreal and special feeling when a diver has deep into Lake Huron to explore
a new shipwreck.
And heat is surrounded by history of the wreck that wants to tell her story.
And with our discovery of the hybrids that sunk during the great storm of 1913, it's
a tragic tale she tells.
The great storm of 1913 was absolutely the most horrific storm that ever hit the Great
Lake.
There were giant waves, 35-foot high, 70-80-mile-an-hour winds, and the losses of almost 270 seamen
and caused the demise of 12 ships.
One of those was the hydras.
Well, the hydras had already taken a tremendous punishment coming across Lake Superior.
It probably would have been enough to sink less of a ship.
And they thought if they had gone through what Lake Superior had to offer, they probably
would be okay going through Lake Huron.
And you have to remember, they had no instruments.
The only thing they had was a barometer.
So to the best of their knowledge, the storm had abated.
They decided to make a run for it down Lake Huron.
And that's when they ran into the worst of it.
When the waves began to come over the stern, they probably got their concern because they
realized their lives hinged on those engines running.
And if anything happened, to stop that engine running, they were doomed.
And eventually, she loses power and she gets caught in the trough and she can't get out.
They didn't know that these conditions were going to last for hours.
And during that period of time, we find that somehow portions of the crew actually managed
to escape into life boats.
Life boats in this day were an absolute last resort.
They were probably the most ill-suited vehicles ever used to save life.
Can you imagine doing it with 70-mile-a-hour winds, a coating of ice on everything in 40-foot
waves?
Well, you know, when they finally did find one of the life boats from the Hydras that
was washed ashore on the Canadian side, it had five occupants in it.
Two of those people were Colonel and Leslie Christie of Marine City.
That must have been devastating to the family to have two brothers roughly the same age
die in the same shipwreck under the same circumstances.
The fact that they were found frozen to death sitting upright in the boat is just an incredible
story.
The day that we discovered the Hydras started out like hundreds of others, and we take the
side scan sonar and we place it over the side and send it out behind the boat, five, six
hundred feet, so that it's able to send out sound pattern to come back an image on the
LCD screen.
And it was amazing, it was so much detail because it was a very good pass.
We could see cargo hatches and cargo holds and we could count them, and there's no question
when we looked at the length, we knew he had finally found the Hydras after a 30-year effort.
A week after an amazing discovery, we headed back out onto Lake Huron to dive into history
for the first time on the Hydras.
Along the way, divers spent a two-hour trip doing everything from reading to planting
their dives with the bull cramps of the Hydras.
Once over the site, divers go through the routines and check their gear for the journey
back into time.
One, two, three, there we are recording.
Many divers use scooters to explore the wreck.
They only spend 20 minutes on the bottom before having to slowly decompress on their
way back to the surface.
They see history in front of them, all 436 feet of the Hydras.
And yet, it's also an underwater grave for sailors.
I can never get over the fact that they do what professional divers wouldn't do unless
they got really well paid for it.
They do it for the love of it.
They're seeing history being developed right in front of their eyes.
To me, that must be the appeal that keeps them going back time after time.
I can understand the draw of finding something that no one has ever seen before, but why
they're so willing to go back and do it week after week after week, it's just remarkable.
And the fact that they garner and gather so much really good information is going to just
be something that historians in the future are just going to value so much, and yet they
do it just for the love of doing it.
These shipwrecks tell a story.
They open up the history of the Great Lakes, they open up the history of Michigan.
You know, if you have to really say what makes you do this, I don't think you can.
It's just an interest in you, and you can't change.
We played it for 30, but we left them here for this.
And now they're going to show up on the sign you point towards.
