ROCHESTER, N.Y. — Two explorers conducting underwater surveys of Lake Ontario have uncovered an aquatic mystery — a rare 19th-century schooner sitting upright 500 feet under the waves.
Jim Kennard and Dan Scoville found the 55-foot-long dagger-board ship this fall using deep scan sonar equipment off the lake’s southern shore.
The ship is the only dagger- board known to have been found in the Great Lakes. The dagger-board was a wood panel that could be extended through the keel to improve the ship’s stability.
The schooner’s origin is a mystery so far. The name of the schooner is unknown, and there are no documented accounts of a dagger-board schooner sinking in Lake Ontario.
The explorers suspect the schooner was being converted to a barge or other sailing craft by its owners and perhaps broke free from its moorings in the ice or during a violent storm and was carried far out on the lake before it sank.
