“To the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
– Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Milwaukee media darling “Deep Thought,” also referred to as the “S.S. Minnow” or just the “Milwaukee Boat” was recently yanked from our shore by the All City Towing company, ending a seven-month long fiasco. Their effort utilized several winches, lifting the boat and loading it onto a flatbed truck then carting it off to a salvage yard, a process that took over eight hours and cost some $55,000.
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The boat was abandoned in October by a couple from Mississippi, who ditched the vessel after they ran out of gas. For one Milwaukeean, Jerry Guyer, the boat became something of a white whale to his Captain Ahab. Guyer, the proprietor of Jerry’s Silo Marina, hoped that he and his crew could successfully save the boat. They made several attempts to pull it from shore in the fall, but by mid-November struggles with weather and equipment led them to abandon the project.
“Most of the time it works out, we did about a dozen salvages last year, but it doesn’t always work,” Guyer says. “It goes with the territory. Doing salvage work is not a 1-2-3 thing. It doesn’t go as planned, nothing goes as quickly as you would imagine. You’re dealing with Mother Nature – the wind, the waves, the sand.” He adds that the safety of his crew “plays a major role in everything we do.” “Deep Thought” spent a long winter becoming covered in layers of graffiti and ice.
By spring, the situation was much worse. Guyer says the vessel was then “three to four times the initial weight in the amount of sand and muck that had filled it up over six months. Every wave brings another bucket of sand in.” He guesses it probably went from 7-8 tons to “probably 20, maybe 30 tons.”
In total, Guyer says his attempts took five or six workdays, “generating a little over a $27,000 invoice through the city, then the county calls me and says stand down, that they hired the trucking company,” Guyer says, referring to All City Towing.
“Not a penny,” is how much Guyer says he was paid for that invoice. To make matters worse, his last attempt at removing the boat earlier this month involved his pontoon-like pulling barge and additional equipment like a pulling stanchion, electric winch, and anchor getting sucked into the sand and stuck right alongside “Deep Thought.”
“I’m not only out of the $27,000, but I’m out of what’s left of the pulling barge. We rented what we call ‘trash pumps’ to try to pump out the water and sand,” Guyer explains. “That very day (the county) called us and told us to vacate and don’t go by it, that was the day we had the trash pumps and all that stuff ready to go to retrieve our equipment at the least, but that didn’t happen.”
Guyer says he isn’t sure what happened to his equipment. He thinks it’s possible All City Towing hauled some of it with them, some pieces might still be stuck in the sand, but he hasn’t embarked on an investigation yet. The weather has been windy and rough and Guyer doesn’t want to get stuck again. Despite all the struggle, Guyer is taking it in stride.
“I don’t have any hard feelings, any regrets, you do what you can do each and every day when it comes to this kind of work,” Guyer says. “Do as much as you can and hope for the best.”
