Glass-Bottom Boats and the Alger Underwater Preserve
Near Munising, Michigan
The water off Munising is so cold and so clear that it has become a kind of museum, and you can tour it without ever getting wet. Michigan set aside these waters as one of its first underwater preserves, protecting the shipwrecks scattered across the bay and around Grand Island. Because Lake Superior is frigid and free of the creatures that devour wood in warmer seas, ships that sank a century and a half ago still sit remarkably whole on the bottom.
The star of the glass bottom boat tours is the Bermuda, a wooden schooner that went down in eighteen seventy in Murray Bay off Grand Island. She rests upright in shallow water, her deck only a short way below the surface, so complete that passengers gazing through the glass hull can trace her rails and hatches. Nearby lies the Herman Hettler, a wooden steamer wrecked in a nineteen twenty six storm, her timbers spread across the sandy bottom.
Other wrecks, the Smith Moore, the Kiowa, and a scuttled tug, draw scuba divers from all over. Glide out over calm water on a bright day and the past rises up to meet you through the clear green depths.
