LR Doty
.jpg) The LR Doty at the Soo Locks
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The LR Doty was an American cargo ship that sank in a storm on Lake Michigan on October 25, 1898 . Most recently, she was north of Milwaukee ( Wisconsin seen). All 17 crew members were killed. The ship dragged the passenger ship Olive Jeanette until the towing rope broke through the strength of the storm and both ships lost sight of each other. It is believed that the ship was overloaded and therefore had a deep draft.
On June 25, 2010, the L. R. Doty was found in Lake Michigan at a depth of 91 m. The grain load was still there.
The ship
The LR Doty was built in 1893 in West Bay City ( Michigan ) in the FW Wheeler & Co. shipyard for the Cuyahoga Transit Company and was hull number 97. It was named after the general manager of the Cuyahoga Transit Company, Lucius Ramsey Doty. The LR Doty was almost identical in construction to its sister ships William F. Sauber, CF Bielman, Tampa, Iosco and Uganda. For the construction of the 89 m long LR Doty , the wood was white oak used. The draft was 6 m and the maximum payload was 2089 tons.
She had nine deck hatches, a 12.50 m high fore mast and two aft masts on which sails could be set if necessary. To stabilize the wooden hull, it was reinforced on the sides with steel arches. She was first launched in May 1893.
The storm
At the time of the LR Doty there was no weather radar. In the fall there was the greatest incentive to run out, as more coal was needed for the winter months and the harvested grain had to be delivered for processing. The LR Doty had survived many severe storms on the Great Lakes for a ship of her time , as she was robustly built.
On October 24, 1898, she sailed south of Lake Michigan from Chicago with a cargo of 107,000 bushels . After the grain was unloaded, the LR Doty was supposed to travel together with the Olive Jeanette for a delivery of iron ore via Lake Superior towards Cleveland . The route should they from Lake Michigan through the Straits of Mackinac to Lake Huron bring, arriving in Midland ( Ontario would unload their cargo).
The two ships sailed towards Wisconsin in calm sea weather . On October 25th, around 1 p.m. EDT , the sea began to get choppy. From around 4 p.m. snow and freezing rain made visibility difficult and the waves reached heights of over 6 m. At 5 p.m. the LR Doty and the Olive Jeanette were north of Milwaukee and had weathered the storm well, then the wind turned and hit the towing bandage from the front, so that shortly afterwards the tow with which the Olive Jeanette was being pulled broke. The captain of the Olive Jeanette reports that the LR Doty then drifted further north until they lost sight of each other.
There were no indications of the LR Doty's whereabouts until the tug Prodigy found floating debris on the surface of the water about 40 km off the coast of Kenosha on October 26 , including a hatch cover and a cabin door that were painted brown similar to that of the LR Doty .
The storm in October 1898 was after all reports one of the worst storms in 30 years. At Milwaukee the schooner Barbarian was driven onto a breakwater and destroyed. A large number of ships sank on the Great Lakes in this storm and the Chicago boardwalk was destroyed.
root cause
After the tow rope broke and there was no longer any visual contact between the two ships, the LR Doty probably tried to turn around to look for the Olive Jeanette . The ship came across the wind, which ran along with the high waves on the full broadside of the ship and capsized it. Nobody saw the LR Doty capsize, proving that it sank within seconds of being separated from the Olive Jeanette .
The LR Doty was with her bug found in a northwesterly direction, which, suggesting that they in trying hard to port , capsized to turn.
The search
In the years that followed, after the LR Doty went missing, her story faded into one of the many thousands of ships wrecked on the Great Lakes in the 19th century. At the end of the 1890s it was believed that the LR Doty wreck had been found about 2 km east of Racine , but it turned out that it was just a previously unknown coral reef .
With the advent of diving in the early 1960s, interest in finding shipwrecks in the Great Lakes increased again. Between the 1970s and 1990s, rumors of the discovery of the LR Doty in shallow waters near Kenosha continued to emerge . However, it was the wreck of a modern boat .
In August 1991, the continued fishing boat Butchie as fishing nets out to ruffe to catch and got tangled up in something. The captain radioed a nearby submersible with a request to expose the nets again. He was about 36 km off the coast of Kenosha and had left the nets almost 90 m deep. While interested in the location, the captain of the submersible had no intention of taking divers there as it was not safe enough to dive for deep wrecks in the early 1990s. The net was then separated from the ship and allowed to sink to the bottom.
In June 2010 a small group of researchers and divers set out to find the LR Doty . After evaluating the sonar scan , it turned out that the wreck is about 61 m long. After a rope was tied to the wreck on June 25, the divers began their dive to the wreck, which could eventually be identified as LR Doty .
Web links
Footnotes
- ^ A b Sarah Biondich: Finding a Century-Old Shipwreck. Express Milwaukee, July 14, 2010, accessed July 13, 2012 .
- ↑ Meg Jones: Finding a Century-Old Shipwreck. Journal Sentinel, June 23, 2010, accessed July 13, 2012 .
- ^ LR Doty († 1898). Retrieved July 13, 2012 .
- ^ Diving Deep to Discover the LR DOTY. June 29, 2010. Retrieved July 13, 2012 .
- ↑ a b c d e f g Steamer LR Doty Located in 300 ft of Water off Milwaukee. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on July 24, 2011 ; Retrieved July 13, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Lost Grain Ship Doty Found Off Milwaukee. Retrieved July 13, 2012 .
- ^ Sunken Treasure In Lake Michigan: Century-Old Ship. National Public Radio, June 24, 2010, accessed July 13, 2012 .
Coordinates: 44 ° 34 ′ N , 87 ° 20 ′ W