person of interest

By Past Com. James L. Ramsey with Dr. Larry W. Stephenson

He’s not a member, but he’s been a frequent guest at our club as a speaker and visiting captain with his crew of Sea Cadets aboard their converted 80-foot Navy patrol boat. Meet Capt. Luke Clyburn: diver, explorer, archeologist and award-winning filmmaker.

Adapted from a story for the ISMA Lodge 7 Grand Ball.

Luke Clyburn and his camera have explored where few others have beneath the Great Lakes. Here he readies himself for a dive.

Aman’s house can tell you a lot about the person who lives there.

Luke Clyburn’s tells you a lot more than that.

It’s more than just a dwelling. It’s a veritable maritime museum, packed with hundreds of marine artifacts from a life – 50 years of it, anyway – of exploration on the Great Lakes.

Correction: make that under the Great Lakes. Because most of Luke’s work is done below the surface of the water – sometimes as much as 200 feet down, a depth where only experienced divers go and live to tell about it.

The modest ranch-style home facing Pontiac Lake speaks eloquently of his adventures. Every room reveals troves of nautical artwork on the walls, recovered underwater treasures on tables and shelves, and dozens of papers, books and reference materials on marine archeology strewn about the desk in his office.

They’re not knicknacks. In the living room there’s a sizeable ship’s anchor, of hand-drawn iron, perhaps 200 years old, that Luke found on a dive in the Keweenaw waterway in the Upper Peninsula. In the dining room, resting on a bar that came from an old blind pig in Pontiac, there’s a piece of wood one might dismiss as a piece of fencepost. Actually, it’s part of a tree trunk. Luke discovered it during a dive in Lake Huron. Its carbon-dated age: 6,890 years. Think of that. An artifact lifted from the depths of a Michigan lake that predates the birth of Christ by nearly 5,000 years. The relic was the subject of a story Luke did for National Geographic several years ago. Oh, and in the family room, there are cages with two large, colorful parrots, one of whom regularly emits a shriek loud enough to start a football game or summon the fire department. He shares this fascinating world with his significant other and longtime diving partner, Kathy Trax, who now, sadly, suffers from dementia.

Much as Luke’s surroundings could tell his story, there is no one more qualified to do that than the man himself. Shipmasters Dr. Larry Stephenson and this writer were able to sit with him this past autumn. Here is our conversation.

Q: Luke, let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and how did you discover the water? And what do you do for a living?

L: I grew up on the banks of the Ohio River. My family’s home was in Evansville, Indiana, right across the water from Kentucky. We had a boat, and when I was 12 or 13, they allowed me to go out in it and do what I wanted to do – fishing, exploring, you name it. Professionally, I wear a lot of hats: I’m a certified real estate appraiser, a master SCUBA instructor and research diving teacher, and underwater photographer.

Q: When and how did you move to Michigan?

L: My mother was a very religious person. She was convinced that Elvis, rock and roll and other evil influences were going to ruin me. So, when I was in high school in Evansville, she packed me up and sent me to Bob Jones Academy in Greenville, South Carolina. Bob Jones was a ministerial school that had two kinds of students: the ones that were religious and wanted to go, and ones like me – rambunctious. A lot of the kids there were from Michigan, around Pontiac and the Oakland County area. Their stories, especially ones about the lakes, made Michigan sound like a place I wanted to be. So, I came up here on my own with the understanding that if I misbehaved, I’d be sent back to Bob Jones. And you know? – it’s amazing how one moment in a day can change your life. I was working for an ambulance company and funeral home in Pontiac because it was the only job I could get at 17. Well, there was a car crash and when I got there, there was a fellow lying in the gutter and I placed a jacket under his head to comfort him. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was the owner and president of Fleet Carrier, a big trucking company. There was an investigation after that, and the retired Sheriff’s deputy who interviewed me was working for First Federal Savings in Pontiac at the time. He must have taken a liking to me, because six months later they called and offered me a job. It became my profession for the next 10 years.

Q: How did you discover diving?

L: That’s an interesting story. As a young person, probably 10 or 11, I watched divers on the Ohio River. They were hardhat divers who were always working on boats, and I always wondered what their world was like. Later, after I came to Michigan and we were living on Sylvan Lake, I uncovered a set of SCUBA gear that someone had apparently stolen and stashed out in a field. Rather than turn it in, I took it out on the lake and jumped in. I could hardly get my breath; it’s a wonder I didn’t die right there. But it got me started. It’s a calling that’s stayed with me to this day.

Q: Do you have a favorite lake to explore?

L: I like Superior because there is so much unknown about it. Did you know there are 6,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes? I have studies that show Lake Superior was once connected to Hudson Bay. So much has changed since the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, and we’re still rebounding from it. Example: the north Shore of Lake Superior today is still rising about one foot every hundred years. The Straits of Mackinac was once a narrow river bed and the Detroit River was just a trickle of what it is today. There was a waterfall with more volume than Niagara that drained the north end of Lake Huron near Tobermory, Ontario.

Q: Tell us about the Sea Cadets and Noble Odyssey Foundation. How did all that come to be?

L: Working for the bank, I met a man named Jim Clarkson, who was a big boater on Lake St. Clair and a founder of the Great Lakes Division of the U.S. Navy Sea Cadets. [The Sea Cadets were founded in 1962 by the Navy League to develop teenage kids with a maritime interest.] In 1972, Jim was ready to start a Sea Cadet program in Oakland County and he wanted me to lead it, so I agreed. The difference was, I intended to actually take the kids to sea on a ship so they could learn firsthand how things work. We eventually acquired an old, 1942-vintage, 75-foot, wood-hulled Navy patrol boat, YP587, which we used as our ‘classroom.’ We took the kids out on the lakes, taught them how to run and maintain the ship according to military discipline, and before long we got into diving, filming, then filmmaking and underwater exploration. Ours is the only program of its kind that does that.

The name ‘Noble Odyssey’ was first coined when we made a film in 1983 and the producers applied it to

A section of a tree stump nearly 7,000 years old was discovered by Luke on the floor of Lake Huron.

our boat, which at the time only had the Navy designation, YP587. [The U.S. Navy as a policy doesn’t attach endearing names to its small ships, you know.] Later it became the name of our foundation, which is used to underwrite the cost of maintaining the boat and conducting the classes. It’s a 501© 3 organization, meaning it’s taxfree to parents and contributors.

Q: What is your most memorable dive?

L: I get asked that a lot. It was up in Lake Michigan near Charlevoix. Kathy was with me on that dive. We found evidence of a river 160 feet under water that would have drained what is now Traverse Bay into the lake about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago. There was a mine there where the inhabitants brought up chert, a form of limestone, that they made into tools – arrowheads, knives, scrapers. The water was so clear, we were able to sit on the bank of that river 160 feet down and look across to the other side, thinking 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, someone probably sat where we were sitting. We think of Columbus coming over here as a long time ago – that was nothing. There were already well-organized civilizations here. They weren’t hunters and gatherers; they were farmers. They were likely more civilized than the English settlers when they arrived. There is so much about ancient history in America we don’t know. I learned recently about a development of people along the Mississippi near St. Louis called the Cahokia. They lived there about 1,200 years ago. Their population at the time was larger than the town of London, England. They had metalworks, they had streets, they had subdivisions. They were not just people living under a tree and killing a rabbit to eat it. It wasn’t that way. They were highly civilized.

Q: Tell us about your current boat, the Pride of Michigan. Is it a ship or a boat?

L: Depends where you’re from. Like the Odyssey, it’s an 80-foot YPclass boat created by the Navy that was used for training midshipmen at the Naval Academy. It was built in 1979 in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and we acquired it in 1989 after the Naval Academy switched to newer technology. It, too, has a wood hull, so it requires a lot of maintenance. The Navy calls it YP for ‘Yard Patrol Boat.’ Ours is YP673.

Q: What’s your latest project?

L: We’re working with Macomb County to study parts of Lake St. Clair that are of great interest. There was a community along the lake near the Clinton River in the 1800s called Belvidere. It disappeared. It’s underwater now, because Lake St. Clair and the Clinton River have changed. We’d like to explore what’s left of it. And there’s Anchor Bay. It’s called that because in the 1800s sailing ships used to anchor there to be resupplied and wait for the right winds to go up the St. Clair River and into the lakes. There was a whole community along the bay dedicated to servicing those ships. It wasn’t just a place for fishing and parties. We need to know more.

Q: Where to from here for Luke Clyburn?

L: The Great Lakes have such a story to tell. We’ve only scratched the surface. I’ve done a lot of studying on the Bronze Age 8,000 years ago and I want to know more about it. You know, people then were planters, farmers – they needed plows, they needed hoes - they needed a way of getting copper from the Keweenaw in the Upper Peninsula. How did they do that? We’ve been working with the University of Michigan, and they’ve found traces of hunting blinds in the middle of Lake Huron – that’s 50 miles out. They wouldn’t be there unless they had a large population to feed. They even found a caribou trail out there. There’s a story there that has never been told.

Luke and his crew of Sea Cadets visit the Club aboard the Pride of Michigan.