Boater Wants 1914 Shipwreck Removed Or Marked As Danger
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A Lombard man wants somebody to do something about a shipwreck in Lake Michigan that he says did a few thousand dollars' damage to his own boat this week.
"You go out on Lake Michigan, you don't expect to hit something 200 yards off the shoreline," Joe Kelly said.
But he did hit something. His 23-and-a-half-foot boat hit the top of the Silver Spray, a steamer that sank in 1914.
"If it was underwater and nobody knew about it, I'd get it, but it's underwater since 1914. What is it still doing there? Or why does it not have buoys around it? That just doesn't make any sense to me," Kelly said.
The top of the Silver Spray is usually visible off 49th Street, but not when Kelly was out on his boat.
"There's a boiler system that protrudes from the water. Well, I don't know if we've had a lot of rain or what the deal was, but you could not see it. It was under water," Kelly said.
He didn't know the wreck was there, and he's been coming to the lake for most of his 41 years.
"If they're not going to extract it, put buoys around it. It's been 100 years and I can't believe somebody hasn't … waverunners? I can't imagine somebody on a waverunner. You hit that, you're going to have a real bad day," he said. "There's boats out there doing 130. If they hit it with their fiberglass hull, they're dead, period. There's no ifs, ands, or buts. That boat's going to shred to pieces, and thank God that we didn't do that. People can absolutely die hitting that thing."
