Yellow buoys mark the wrecks’ locations, and divers can follow their lines down to submerged signage identifying each.

by Noah Diedrich, for the Community News Service

Those large yellow buoys floating atop Lake Champlain aren’t for monitoring the weather, nor are they for decoration. Instead, they mark the final resting places of centuries-old ships that wrecked on the lakebed.

The floats are part of the Underwater Preservation Program, a 40-year-old initiative run by the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum that aims to uphold the federal Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987. The act looks to prevent historic wrecks from being disturbed by treasure hunters and salvagers. 

The museum oversees shipwrecks on Vermont’s side of the lake. 

“This preserve system is one of the very first in the nation,” said Chris Sabick, the museum’s executive director. “It really is a mechanism for the state to achieve its mandated goals of preservation and access to shipwreck sites.”

Vermont’s system, implemented in 1982, has been a model that other states have replicated, Sabick said. The old ways of locating shipwrecks were hazardous to the wrecks themselves — a method the museum wants to avoid.

“They would drag their anchor along until it snagged on something, and then they would dive down and see what that was,” Sabick said. “If that happened to be a shipwreck, it might take a piece of the shipwreck with it when you recovered the anchor or when the wind started blowing and pulled the shipwreck apart.”

The current system provides a much less invasive technique. The yellow buoys mark the wrecks’ locations, and divers can follow buoys’ lines down to submerged signage identifying each wreck and providing pointers on how to observe without impacting the sites. 

The wrecks range from steamships to schooners, with most dating back to the early 1800s. A popular wreck is the Burlington Bay Horse Ferry, which is exactly what it sounds like — a horse-powered ferry that sank around 1814. 

The preserve program, now in its 40th year, is looking to expand access to the shipwrecks for non-divers, Sabick said. One such addition is taking visitors to wreck sites by boat and using remote-operated vehicles to transmit a live feed of the wreck to a TV screen on deck. 

The museum also created composite 3D models of the wrecks from digital images taken of the sites, which can be viewed on its website from anywhere with an internet connection. 

“It’s just broadening the access to these sites, even for people that aren’t local or aren’t divers,” Sabick said. 

H.494, a capital bonds bill, would allot $46,000 to the Underwater Preserves Program, an annual appropriation that goes toward site inspections and maintenance. The yearly sum increased from $36,000 in the past few years as the program added two new shipwreck sites. 

The bill has already passed through the Vermont House and now sits in the Senate. A committee of conference reported on Tuesday that it is recommending the upper house withdraw its recommended amendment .

The proposed changes do not affect the allotment to the preserves program. 

Laura Trieschmann, state historic preservation officer, said the museum has been a tremendous partner that brings life to the wrecks. 

“They’re not just manning the wrecks with buoys and getting the permits,” she said. “They’re researching the stories of these places so that they’re not just a pile of wood on the bottom of the lake.”

About 600 divers visit the wrecks each year, which contributes greatly to the continuation of the preservation program, Trieschmann said. 

“They’re not going to be around forever,” she said, “(considering) the nature of where they are and mussels and things like that could damage them, as well as boats. We definitely want to showcase them while we can.”

Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship