Lake Champlain Continues To Reveal Treasures

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                                     Lake Champlain Continues To Reveal Treasures



                                       Images Of Benedict Arnold's Warship Emerge






May 21, 2009
BURLINGTON, Vt.

-- Diver and captain Fred Fayette grew up exploring Lake Champlain and still makes the trip from Burlington to Juniper Island and his family's summer home. Yet he continues to marvel at the discoveries he helped uncover beneath the water's surface. Fayette was a key member of the crew that over the last decade mapped the bottom of Champlain with precision and technology never brought to bear before.

Fayette's research boat, Neptune, is outfitted with sonar, remote underwater cameras, and computers that probed the lake floor each summer, back and forth across computer-guided grids. It was often tedious work, he recalls, the equivalent of driving from New York to San Francisco at three miles per hour.

Until, that is, his sonar got a hit -- his crew was electrified by the image of an unknown or previously undiscovered object on the screen.

"It was very exciting," he said. "We've had dozens of shipwrecks over the years. We had airplanes appear, a small plane appear in the southern part of the lake in 200 feet of water." Fayette recalled finding a few railroad cars on the lake bottom off Rouses Point, NY too.

The mega-moment came in 1997, when the sonar picked up an image on very deep water in a location Fayette won't reveal. It proved to be the American warship Spitfire -- the previously unaccounted for gunboat in Benedict Arnold's fleet, which sunk in October 1776.

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Art Cohn, director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and a marine archaeologist, marveled at the pristine condition of the Spitfire, sitting upright, fully intact, as if still sailing on the lake floor. And inside? "What we believe is an artifact collection frozen in time from the early-morning hours of Oct. 12, still in the hull, so the archaeological potential, we think, is extraordinary," Cohn said. "The meaning to the national story is as good as you can get."

The collection of shipwrecks, which Cohn calls the best-preserved anywhere in the world, all form part of Lake Champlain's history, attracting thousands of divers to its waters. Many lie in accessible depths of water, a half-dozen in the Burlington harbor alone.

This summer's 400th anniversary of French explorer Samuel de Champlain's one and only voyage south from what is now Canada is expected to focus new attention on the treasure trove lying on the lake bottom.

With the mapping project now concluded, Cohn says the urgent mission now is development of a permanent lake management plan that ensures the nearly 300 shipwrecks are catalogued and preserved for generations to come. "People should take pride in the legacy left here, the history that took place, the size and diversity of this incredible collection," Cohn said.

Vermont U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy, also an amateur diver, agrees. "We have to preserve them as historical treasures; otherwise you'll have souvenir hunters going down with grappling hooks and pulling pieces out."

Development of the management plan is now in a preliminary phase, Cohn said, and will several months of work to pull together. He said he plans to work with the Lake Champlain Basin Program, and will likely seek technical and financial help from neighboring states and the federal government.



Copyright 2009 by WPTZ.com.

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