A 33-foot boat has been stuck along the shore between McKinley and Bradford beaches since Oct. 13. The wet sand around its keel and propeller has foiled salvage attempts, as has lake ice. The boat – officially named Deep Thought but also known as Milwaukee’s S.S. Minnow – will likely remain immobilized until spring. It’s owned by a Mississippi couple, Richard and Sherry Wells, who told local reporters that they ran out of gas when they were caught in a storm.
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This Kind of Thing Happens
Boats running out of gas or facing crises isn’t uncommon. The Coast Guard normally fields five to 10 calls each week in summer for disabled boats on the lake. The same week Deep Thought got stuck, another boat was stranded along Milwaukee’s shoreline – but was towed without incident. And some 150 miles upshore in Door County, there’s a 143-foot tugboat that’s been stuck in shallow water for over three years. An engineless hull, it was sold for scrap in 2021. Once it became stuck, its new owner abandoned it. “The cost to remove it exceeds its scrap value,” says Jerry Guyer, owner of Jerry’s Salvage.
Who’s on the hook?
The Coast Guard and Jerry’s Salvage, the company hired by the Wellses to remove the boat, both say communications with the couple fell off in winter. At press time, it was unclear which government agency would be responsible for ensuring the boat’s removal. Owner Jerry Guyer says he has spent around $20,000 trying to dislodge the boat before winter hit. He fears Deep Thought will end up as scrap. “We’d like to save the boat,” Guyer says, but “the only way to do that is to pull it out by the water.”
A Really Deep Thought
For her master’s thesis at UW-Milwaukee, “Spooky Lakes” TikTok sensation Geo Rutherford went to Bradford Beach every day for 90 days, ruminating on the Great Lakes and collecting what washed up – shells of invasive species, chips of brick, more types of plastic than seem possible. “The material you find on the shore is evidence of what’s happening in the water,” Rutherford says. “The pessimist in me sees the boat as another inevitable piece of human detritus, part of this collection of trash and articles of the Anthropocene that show our impact on the Great Lakes.”
Why Do We Care?
We’ve been wondering this, but … this saga just seems really Milwaukee, doesn’t it? Humans are intensely interested in things that wash up on our liminal but impenetrable shorelines. Everything is some version of a message in a bottle. Perhaps it’s why, on a windy, 15-degree Saturday afternoon in January, around 30 Milwaukeeans gathered on the rocks just to look at Deep Thought, snap photos and wonder. Some climbed aboard to explore. People don’t congregate to look at a vacant home or a broken-down car by the side of the road. But they do, apparently, come to stare at a boat.
