Site Interpretation

I first dove the S.P. Ely in 1971.  The visibility in the 1970’s was rarely better than 10 to 15 feet making it difficult to interpret what you were seeing.  Eventually we managed to identify some of the structures surrounding the mast holes.  If you look below the bulwarks (rails) directly opposite the mast holes you can still see the belaying pin rails.    These look like thick shelves with holes in them. Belaying pins looked like small Billy clubs and were used to secure the sail sheets or rigging lines.  Protruding through the main rails are iron eyes formed from the tops of straps called chain plates.  The chain plates are how the shrouds or lines that supported the masts were connected to the hull.  Chain plates connected to the deadeyes that you often see in artifact collections.  The deadeyes were three holed wooden blocks that allowed the tension of the shrouds to be adjusted. (See illustration) Of course the deadeyes were removed long before I saw the Ely for the first time since these were usually prime targets for souvenir hunting divers of the “early years.”  In the early seventies there were two sheet winches on the deck between cargo holds.  Divers removed both of them by the late 1970's.  One is now on display in the SS Meteor and the other is supposedly on display at the wheelhouse museum near the Two Harbors lighthouse.  Additionally there was a dual piston pump that was partially buried under wooden beams near the keel and centerboard trunk.  The pump is also on display in the SS Meteor museum.  Now the only machinery that remains on the wreck is the centerboard winch that lies in the hold on the starboard side of the centerboard trunk.  In the 70’s the chain that was used to lift the centerboard was still connected from the winch to the centerboard.  We discovered the chain in Jack the Frogman’s old relics when he passed away, and missed acquiring it for a GLSPS Put-It-Back project by one day when it was sent to the scrap yard with other old steel tanks.  The centerboard trunk is the tall structure built on the keelson just forward of the intact deck.  If you look through the holes in the top of the centerboard trunk you can glimpse the centerboard still resting in its retracted position.  Great Lakes' schooners were often equipped with centerboards instead of deep keels, which allowed them to service the shallow Great Lakes ports.  The centerboard can be seen clearly on the schooner Lucerne in the Apostle Islands where the top is broken off centerboard trunk.

In the early ‘90s the Corps of Engineers added the curved pilings to the breakwater and in doing so dropped several large boulders on the stern deck of the Ely.  To keep the deck from collapsing they sawed across the deck separating the aft twenty-five feet of deck from the rest of the deck.  This action weakened the fragile wreck and caused the starboard side to lean even more noticeably to the outside.  This in turn caused the forward twenty feet of deck to collapse.  Those of us that dove the Ely knew within five years it would be another flat wooden wreck site.  In 1994 the original founders of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society installed the original steel rods that now keep the sides together and vertical.  Two of these rods were replaced with heavier rods in 1999.  Now the goal of GLSPS is to repair the damage that the boulders caused to the stern portion of the deck and the hatch coaming, much of which has been pushed down or collapsed into the hold.  The Ely is not only a popular dive site, but it is also on the National Register of Historic Places and is Minnesota’s only example of these historic Great Lakes schooners from the mid 19^th Century.