Patty Loew:
Most Lake Michigan shipwrecks date back more than 100 years. It's a time when wooden boats traveled the Great Lakes, vulnerable to storms, hidden rocks and floating debris. This week, "In Wisconsin" reporter Art Hackett brings you one man's quest to locate a particular boat off the shores of Sheboygan.  

Art Hackett:
For 30 years, Steve Radovan was a man with an obsession. He's been searching for the Pringle. That's not a potato that's been chipped. It's a ship that's been wrecked.

Steve Radovan:
I saw the pictures of it as an excursion boat for the Pabst company down in Milwaukee and I knew that this would be a really neat shipwreck to explore, that it was going to be very ornate.
Art Hackett:
In 1905 she was sold to Milwaukee's Pabst Brewery.

Brendan Baillod:
Pringle is really significant.

Art Hackett:
Brendan Baillod is president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archaeological Association.

Brendan Baillod:
She became a Milwaukee icon. In a short period of time she carried over 75,000 people from the food of Grand Avenue out to the Whitefish Bay resort which had just been built and was one of the major social points of Milwaukee.

Art Hackett:
When Radovan started looking for the Pringle in the late 1970s, he had just started to dive. Divers need shipwrecks to explore almost as much as they need a tank of air to breathe.

Steve Radovan:
There are very shipwreck hunters on the Great Lakes. There's a number of divers on the Great Lakes, but most of them don't want to take the time that it takes to look for shipwrecks.

Art Hackett:
As Radovan got older, he dove less and spent more time finding wrecks for other divers to explore.

Steve Radovan:
For me, I like the solitude in that. I would go out on my boat and spend all night long just sitting there looking at the sonar and driving back and forth, back and forth.

Art Hackett:
But all those nights on the water yielded no results. The Pringle would remain the holy grail of Lake Michigan shipwrecks. The night the Pringle went to the bottom of Lake Michigan in June of 1922, she had been stripped of her finery. She was a steam-driven tugboat. The Pringle sank while towing a freighter back to Ohio.

Steve Radovan:
I started looking where the Pringle was supposedly to be, where the newspaper account said it was, and in the meantime I found two other ships in that area, but not the Robert Pringle. So I started thinking that the Robert Pringle was going to be out in the shipping lanes, which puts it deeper than 230 feet. That's not great for us divers because we're diving on air and that's at the maximum limits of air diving. I was thinking to myself, well, this thing, it's probably not going to be found by me.

Art Hackett:
In May of 2008, Radovan took a team of divers to a site six miles offshore from Sheboygan.

Steve Radovan:
I knew there was something out there because one of the commercial trawlers snagged a wreck in deep water out there and told me about this back in the late '70s.

Art Hackett:
He had spotted something with his own sonar in the area 15 years before. He thought it was probably a long-lost schooner. When the divers surfaced, he was in for a shock.

Man:
Expansion engine. Does that mean anything to you?

Man:
Huge. Huge.

Steve Radovan:
The John Pringle. It's the Pringle.

Man:
Yep.

Steven Radovan:
I've been looking for that one for 30 years.

Steve Radovan:
This is the first view of the wreck that anybody has ever seen since the 1920s. They came down right by that winch.

Art Hackett:
The pictures are murky, but they're proof of what lay on the bottom.

Steve Radovan:
Right here we knew that it was the Robert Pringle.

Art Hackett:
Try and explain what you were thinking at that time, what you felt.  

Steve Radovan:
Actually, I wasn't all that excited. I've been in on these finds all of my life. It's hard to explain the emotions, but I didn't get all that emotional of it. Brendan probably gets a lot more emotionally attached to this stuff than I do.    

Brendan Baillod:
When they said it had a triple expansion steam engine, we were floored. We knew what it was. Steamers are a fairly rare find in the Great Lakes. For every ten schooner hulls, you find one steamer. This is a real nautical time capsule.

Art Hackett:
Divers have visited only a handful of times. It's 300 feet below the surface. They have to use special breathing equipment. The 38 degree water requires heated, insulated suits. To gather these pictures, Scoles, Xelowski and Janzen present an hour and a half below the surface. They could only spend 20 minutes exploring and recording video.

Brendan Baillod:
As people who look at shipwrecks a lot, we see a lot of broken wrecks. There were still lightbulbs hanging over the side. The bell was still cradled on top of the pilot house. The ornate brass work on the wheel and engine was overwhelming to us.

Art Hackett:
In the wheelhouse, a file cabinet hangs open.

John Scoles:
I looked in the drawers, one of the top drawers, the bottom was out, and the bottom drawer was open and there was a little, tiny box in there. I'm not sure what it was.

Art Hackett:
As he looks at the videotape, Radovan is most puzzled by the fact that there's anything this big sitting so long intact in 300 feet of water.

Steve Radovan:
Totally amazing for as heavy a boat as this is to have been in this good of shape when it sank because normally what happens is the air pockets, air tends to blow these cabins and that off as they submerge. But for some odd reason, it didn't happen with this one.

Art Hackett:
How the Pringle's hull survived to be intact is just one of the mysteries he can still obsess over. There's also the mystery of why it sank nearly 90 years ago.

Steve Radovan:
I would rely on their original reports that they just hit some floating timbers. They make big rafts of logs and take them up and down the lakes. Every once in a while, the rafts broke apart and the logs were left floating in the lake. I'm pretty sure that the Pringle is sitting on its damage. And there's probably no way we're ever going to be able to get down in the bilges here and look for that. Maybe a diver in the future will be able to do that, but this is sitting in pretty deep water. I don't think that's going to happen for quite a few years.  

Patty Loew:
Perseverance pays off. We'll keep you posted on any new developments regarding the Pringle.