Serving Lake Erie’s North Shore Friday April 25, 2014
INSIDE A taste for Illegal Caviar The lake sturgeon population in the Great Lakes-Upper St. Lawrence River is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act STORY PAGE 2
“The shipwreck that changed my life.” Mike Fletcher
War of 1812 Report April 15: Captain Arthur Sinclair receives orders to take charge of the American squadron upon Lake Erie STORY PAGE 2
The Northern Snakehead The northern snakehead is a predatory fish native to southern and eastern Asia that is now found in several American states. STORY PAGE 3
Andrew Hibbert
Port Bruce Report It’s election time again for the board of the Port Bruce Ratepayers Association. STORY PAGE 3
Port Stanley Report On Sunday, April 13, a group of not-so-faint-of-heart participants took part in the plunge into the icy cold waters of Lake Erie. STORY PAGE 4
Government helps youth get jobs The Government of Canada’s Youth Employment Strategy is helping youth develop the skills and gain the experience they need to get jobs now and prepare for the workforce of tomorrow. STORY PAGE 4
The annual Shipwrecks festival in Welland is always and interesting venue for learning about all things underwater. This year’s 20th Annual festival, sponsored by the Niagara Divers Association, was no less interesting. The day, Saturday April 5th, started at 9:00 am with a welcome from Master of Ceremonies Tom Wilson. Tom is a long time Great Lakes diver and has dived exotic locations like the WWII wrecks in Truk Lagoon in the central Pacific, the Caribbean, and the deep ocean wrecks off North Carolina. Tom is a professional underwater photographer with many magazine feature credits. Tom introduced the first presenters of the day Mike and Georgann Wachter. This husband and wife dive team are well known as the authors
Above: Mike Fletcher with underwater video camera. Left: The sidewheel Steam Ship Atlantic that sank in August of 1852 near Long Point. The shipwreck that changed his life. Atlantic painting by Robert McGreevy
of Erie Wrecks and Lights, Erie Wrecks East, and Erie Wrecks West. In addition to their books, Mike and Georgann have recently published a Lake Erie shipwreck map listing over 300 GPS wreck coordinates for divers. They have been diving around the world since the mid 1970’s. However, nowhere else in the world have they discovered the kind of pristine and perfectly preserved shipwrecks that lie in Lake Erie and the fresh waters of the Great Lakes. Their talk “Armored Warriors of the Deep” covered the groundbreaking diving operations by early hardhat
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Other speakers during the day were Marc-André Bernier, Chief of the Parks Canada Underwater Archaeology Service since 2008. He told the story of the Underwater Archaeology that Parks Canada has conducted over the last 50 years. From a 16th-century Basque whalers in Labrador to an American World War II plane in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the pre-contact sites in Gwaii Haanas National Park in British Continued On Page 5
Eileen Myers painting of HMCS Ojibwa we arrive in Port Burwell to see HMCS Ojibwa docked for the very last time”, said Smith. “The fresh coat of black paint belied its age as a Cold War submarine.
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divers who called their dive suits “dive armor”. These were the pioneers of Great Lakes diving, treasure, and salvage work.
There was an air of excitement at the Elgin Military Museum in St. Thomas as well known Oshawa artist Eileen Myers and her husband Alan Smith arrived to present her painting of HMCS Ojibwa to the Museum of Naval History. The story of the painting began in the fall of 2012, when Smith first learned that the Oberon submarine HMCS OJIBWA was in the final stage of her journey to Port Burwell where she was to become a museum. As a submariner himself in the 1970’s, Smith had served on the British Royal
Navy Oberon HMS Otter. In 1975, while based at HMS Neptune in Scotland, he had even had occasion to meet some of Ojibwa’s crew when she was docked there on deployment. “Fast forward nearly 40 years to a frigid December day in Canada when
That trip was nostalgic. Smith asked his wife Eileen, an artist, if she could commemorate HMCS Ojibwa’s storied past with a painting. After six months of hard work and creativity, the depiction came to life on canvas. “With such an achievement I was tempted to keep it for myself. However, I remembered our original intent was that it should be donated to the museum and shared with everyone,” Smith admitted. Continued On Page 7