- [Narrator] On this edition of Great Lakes Now.
Keeping the craft of wooden boat building alive.
- [Matt] It's like old cars, or old airplanes or whatever, you know?
It's cool.
It's a piece of our history.
- [Narrator] Removing trash from our lakes and rivers.
- Lots and lots and lots of fishing line, lots of car parts.
I find knives, guns, pretty much anything anybody drops into the river, we find.
- [Narrator] And seeing our region's prehistoric past through ultra-rare fossils.
(melodious instrumental music) - [Narrator] This program is brought to you by: The Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation.
The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Laurie & Tim Wadhams.
- [Narrator] The Consumers Energy Foundation is committed to serving Michigan from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future, to continuing business growth, academic achievement, and community involvement.
Learn more at consumersenergy.com/foundation.
- [Narrator] The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV.
The Polk Family Fund.
Eve & Jerry Jung.
The Americana Foundation.
The Brookby Foundation.
Founders Brewing Company.
And viewers like you.
Thank you.
- Hi, I'm Ward Detwiler.
Welcome back to Great Lakes Now.
People have been sailing the Great Lakes for centuries, and boats have changed a lot in that time.
But one island community in our region is trying to preserve some of the old ways of boatbuilding.
Every year on one Saturday in August, more than 7,000 visitors descend on the small community of Hessel, Michigan, to celebrate the unique craftsmanship of antique wooden boats.
Hessel is in the Les Cheneaux Islands, on the northern shore of Lake Huron in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
The 36 islands are home to some of the most beautiful wooden boats anywhere in the world.
Their history in these islands dates back to the early 1900s when summer residents came to the area on steamships.
- The steamers would come from Detroit and from Chicago up here and we had seven hotels that were all on the lakeshore, old wooden hotels.
- [Ward] The Les Cheneaux Islands became home to boat builders like Chris Craft, a name synonymous with antique wooden boats.
In fact, the first Chris Craft boat dealership in the country was opened in Hessel, Michigan in 1926.
- So they would use these Chris Craft or use these antique and classic boats to get to the mainland daily to go grocery shopping.
- That was their mode of transportation.
- [Ward] As the years passed, fewer wooden boats were being manufactured and fiberglass boats became the more popular choice.
But residents in the Les Cheneaux communities of Hessel and nearby Cedarville were determined to find a way to preserve the rich tradition of wooden boat building.
Bob Smith was part of the group.
- We talked about the older craftsman retiring and there weren't new generations to take their place.
Well, with the history of the boat building and Les Cheneaux in general, we didn't want to lose that craftsmanship.
- [Ward] So the community decided to build a school to teach the art of wooden boat building.
The Great Lakes Boat Building School opened its doors in 2005 and has trained more than 200 students who have gone on to successful careers in the marine industry.
- Hi Ken, this is Nikki calling from the Great Lakes Boat Building School.
How are you?
- [Ward] Nikki Storey is the school's president.
- We offer two programs.
We have our comprehensive career wood boat building program which is the foundation of the school and has been here in place for 16 years.
It's evolved and changed over time.
And then we have a marine service technology program which actually has an exclusive partnership with the marine manufacturer Mercury Marine.
So that's a really neat thing about our programs as well.
- [Ward] Each program is twelve months long, and has between 12 and 24 students.
Most are between the ages of 18 and 45, and most are from the Midwest.
- Sometimes we pick up students from the East Coast or the West Coast but the majority come from right here from either Michigan or Wisconsin, Ohio, New York, we pull students from there too.
In addition, every year we seem to pull in a student from overseas.
We've had a student from France, the Bahamas, Australia.
So it just adds a lot of diversity to the groups here.
- That come down at all there, Brandon?
- [Ward] Matt Edmondson was a student at the school before becoming the lead instructor.
- Truthfully because that stuff's waterproof, it's okay, the paint doesn't stick to the actual seam.
We focus on traditional boat building in the first portion of the year which is focusing on holding pieces of wood together, the mechanical fasteners like rivets and bolts and screws and then we kind of shift into using the modern materials like epoxy and fiberglass.
And how do we kind of marry that with wood to make a modern version of a wooden boat which we call wood composite, Cedar strip or a laminated boat would be an example of that and then we move to restoration.
I would say that in the wooden boat world, restoration and repair and maintenance is probably the lion's share of wooden boating as we see it today.
A lot of boats that take care of and repair.
I would say it draws a lot of interest from the general public because it's like old cars, or old airplanes or whatever, you know?
It's cool.
It's a piece of our history.
- [Ward] Mike Latsch is a student from Michigan.
- We learned how to plan out the boats, figure out what needs to go where, proper measurements, how to align everything properly so that way you get a really nice shear line on the boats.
If you look at this boat the way it rolls as it goes back, learning things like that.
- [Ward] Mike has been working to bring new life to a unique wooden utility boat.
- This is a 1950s Lymon.
It was donated to the school a few years ago and I've spent the last four months restoring it.
Currently right now I am sanding it to put the finish coat on the varnished parts of it.
Before I was replacing the planks in the frame and the ribs and the bulkhead and the transom had to be replaced.
Most of it was pretty rotted.
It hadn't been taken care of over the last several decades and so we restored it.
- [Ward] Mike has interviews scheduled with several Michigan marine companies and is even considering working on tall ships in the future.
- I'm 95 percent tactile learner so I need to work with my hands and being in an industry where I can work with hands constantly is exactly what I need.
I love doing it every day.
- [Ward] Will Berryhill came to the school from Indiana.
His class recently finished building a boat called a skiff.
- It needed a floor to be put in, like the seats, the deck, the bulkheads, putting the motor on it.
All that stuff still had to be done, so our class took care of that.
It was just beautiful when we pulled it out of the finishing room first time in the sunshine with that final coat of varnish on there we just looked at it like, whoa, yeah we did this.
- [Ward] After finishing the boat building curriculum, Will went on to the marine service technology program working on engines.
- [Will] Okay, hit it.
(engine running) - [Ward] Will says he plans to stay in the Les Cheneaux Islands and work at one of the boat shops in the area when he graduates.
He shouldn't have a problem finding employment.
The school has a 100% placement rate and some potential employers have even offered scholarships and sponsorships to students.
- All of our students have offers and actually great offers.
Students going to Wisconsin, students going to Texas, many staying right here in Michigan.
It's a thriving industry and an industry that is just desperate for employees.
- We're seeing a peak right now in the marine industry where there's a huge demand for boats and having work done on boats but there's a huge skills gap as we have seen with a lot of other trades as well.
So really, students can write their own ticket right now, they can go pretty much go wherever they want.
- [Ward] Wherever these students go, the lessons of the Les Cheneauxs and the Great Lakes Boat Building School will hopefully keep the beauty of these wooden boats alive for future generations to enjoy.
- It's kind of calling back to a bygone era where things were made a lot more by hand.
But then there's also just the boat itself is a beautiful thing to be able to make something, see it on the water, not be sinking, and then to go places in it.
There's an unlimited freedom to being on the water.
- For more about the boats of the Great Lakes from canoes to thousand-foot freighters, visit us at greatlakesnow.org.
Unfortunately, we've put more than boats into the Great Lakes.
We've also added trash that often goes unseen, hidden beneath the water's surface.
But a few individuals have taken it upon themselves to do something about that invisible litter, and rid our waterways of garbage, one piece at a time.
When you go fishing, you can fish from a boat.
Drop a pole off the shoreline.
Or you can just toss in a big magnet.
Jason Vanderwal is known as the Motor City Magnet Fisher, with more than 100-thousand followers on TikTok.
Jason, who manages a towing and repair business, has been fishing since he was a kid, but he only got hooked on magnet fishing recently.
- Last year my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said, I want a magnet.
I went online, I picked one out and started two days after my birthday.
- [Ward] Jason says Magnet Fishing is growing in popularity and has become a world-wide passion for some, thanks to the internet.
And now Jason is teaching kids in the Detroit area how to magnet fish with a series of classes.
- So when you're bringing it back, you want to kind of dip it up and down.
Just... Yeah, just like that.
But bring it in a little bit each time.
- I can feel like scratching.
- [Jason] Yup, yup.
- The class is in Ecorse, on the banks of the Detroit River, which has been used for fishing, shipping, and recreation for centuries.
Tell us what we're up to here today?
This is pretty awesome.
- This is an initiative that my wife dreamt up called Get the Motor City Magnet Fishing.
Since we're so avid about magnet fishing, we enjoy it.
We like cleaning the waterways.
We decided to try to extend it to the children in the area.
Now, what I want you to pay attention to.
These fishermen down here, you see their fishing lines running right into the water?
Make sure that you're not throwing over to their fishing lines.
So this is an event where we're able to give a magnet kit to children between five and 15 so they can learn how to help clean the waterways, learn what's in the water and just to get them up and out of the house.
They've been in the house the last years, cooped up.
They gotta be ready to do something.
- It got stuck on something real heavy and it was hard to pull in.
And then I saw like a big long metal pole in the water and pulled it up.
- So outside of some of the treasure that you find, the fun stuff, what are some of the other things that you find in the river that you're pulling out?
- Lots and lots and lots of fishing line, lots of fishing hooks, sinkers, car parts.
I find spark plugs, catfish poles, knives, guns, pretty much anything anybody wants to get rid of or accidentally drops into the river, we find.
- [Ward] That includes large chunks of iron ore and steel slag that Jason believes was dumped back in the 1800's.
Along with all the metal, the Magnet Fishers also snag onto a lot of junk that is not magnetic but still dangerous to animals and humans.
- There's places I pulled in 60, 70-pounds in one day of just lead sinkers and fishing line, which is my number one goal to get out of the water is all of that, because that's a big hazard for the wildlife as well as anybody who may accidentally fall in the river or the Detroit Police dive team.
They worry about it a lot too.
- [Ward] Get tangled up and stuff.
- Yeah.
- [Ward] While the metal itself may not be harming the water, Jennifer Caddick with the Alliance for the Great Lakes says it's important to remove it.
- I could imagine, big pieces of metal or even small pieces of metal, right.
Are going to smother the underwater grasses and other sort of natural bottom areas that fish and other little species use to find food, right.
- [Ward] And, along with the fishing tackle and run-of-the-mill metal trash, every so often, somebody catches a gun.
- It looks like about a .38, would be my guess.
It's a Rossi.
- [Woman] Yeah.
I saw a Rossi.
- [Jason] Rossi is probably the brand.
Rossi could have just been the manufacturer.
- [Woman] Where would the numbers be?
- The serial would probably be over here.
Awesome.
- [Woman] I got my wish that we wanted to pull something I don't pull out in the country.
- [Jason] Yup, we're gonna have to call the Police on that.
- [Lt. Howard] Ecorse Police, this is Lt. Howard.
- Hey Lt. Howard, this is Jason Vanderwal.
I'm down at John Dingell Park, we're magnet fishing and we pulled out a handgun that we'd like to turn it in.
I've talked to him two or three times... - [Ward] So this happens fairly often, you find something like a gun.
- I've turned in two out of here.
Tanner's gotten two and then another gentleman I know has gotten two or three.
- [Ward] After observing all the fun these Magnet Fishers were having, I was itching to try it myself.
- Hey Ward, if you're gonna try this you'll gonna need some gloves.
- Awesome.
- So do you lift?
Tough guy?
- Yeah, let's do it.
- Alright, I got the magnet for you!
Let's go try this one out.
So it looks clear, so you can heave-ho that thing as far as you can.
- So I just go back and forward as if I was just throwing a magnet.
- Pretty much, exactly.
Alright!
- [Ward] That one got out there!
- [Jason] Well it's gonna keep going down to the bottom.
Now you can pull it in.
This one you don't have to dip.
This one is actually made for dragging across the bottom, the other ones are made for dipping up and down.
This one is made for being pulled right straight towards you.
So you can just pull it slowly towards you.
All right.
What you get?
- [Ward] What do we have here?
- All right.
So let me grab a bucket to put that in.
- [Ward] This isn't quite the treasure I was looking for, but, we'll have to do it again.
I have no idea what we just found.
There's no telling what some of this junk is, or how long it's been in the river, but the same can't be said for everything Jason finds.
People treated the river differently one hundred years ago and they're dumping stuff in.
But now it's like we should know.
But, yeah, 99-percent of what we're pulling out has been thrown in in the last 10 to 15 years.
It's not...
I find players... Those don't bother me, I know that those were an accident.
But, the beer bottle caps, the batteries, the just wads of fishing line that they just throw in the water instead of walking 10-feet to the trash can to throw it away.
That's the stuff that irritates me and really bothers me and the stuff I really want to get out of there.
- [Ward] I was really surprised when I pulled up to see how many kids were down here doing this.
It was really awesome.
- I'm very happy about this.
This makes me wanna do it again next year.
- [Ward] More than 200 miles east of Detroit in Lake Ontario at the bottom of Humber Bay in Toronto, trash can be seen everywhere.
Just like Jason, the Magnet Fisherman, a local scuba diver decided to do something about all that garbage.
- [Mark] And as we were going through, we noticed this very, very large field of garbage.
It was never there before.
- [Ward] Meet 16-year old Mark Turezki who has been diving since age 10.
- It was a lot of very specific items that were clearly coming from people on the shore who are maybe not cleaning up after themselves and letting stuff get blown into the water.
- [Ward] Turezki and his Dad decided to videotape it all and post it online.
They wanted to show what Humber Bay looked like before and then after when they found pieces of trash scattered all over the lake bed.
- I got a journalist from blog TO, blog Toronto.
She was very interested in the story and kind of kicked this whole thing off.
And it led to a lot of other news agencies like CTV News, Global News, CBC.
As we were swimming out we noticed that there's a huge pile of garbage.
My intention was that maybe even a small percentage of people would look after where they throw their stuff.
When it gets blown into the water, it's almost as if, you know, well, you know, it's gone.
Whatever.
I don't have to look at it, it's fine.
But, my intention was to kind of show that, no, it's not gone and it's actually amassing here.
And it's very bad for the environment.
- [Ward] Jennifer Caddick of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, says a recent study conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology, estimated that 22-million pounds of plastic enters the Great Lakes each year.
- Plastic never goes away.
Eventually that will just break down into smaller and smaller pieces.
And obviously that is a problem for wildlife.
But those tiny pieces of plastic called micro plastics eventually end up in our drinking water.
- [Ward] Caddick says while it's important for people to pick up after themselves, companies also need to step up and develop ways to reduce plastic in the products they make.
- I see a role for myself in these underwater cleanup efforts, as I think I showed that anyone can get into diving and anyone can get into these underwater clean ups.
You don't have to have millions and millions of dollars of funding and professional equipment to clean up the lakes.
You can do it yourself and anyone of any age can really do it.
- If you want to give magnet fishing a try, and see what's on the bottom of your local lake or river, go to GreatLakesNow.org for some tips on how to get started.
When you picture Wisconsin, you might think of beer, or dairies, or the Lake Michigan shoreline, but would you think of incredible fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old?
You should.
- When you picture a fossil, you probably think of something like this, a gigantic skeleton of a prehistoric beast, like a dinosaur or a mastodon.
These skeletons are on display at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.
Carrie Eaton is the museum's curator.
Some of her most popular exhibits are preserved bones.
- What we're seeing mostly is the bone, and over time that bone is transformed from that organic material into something that's much more mineral.
And it's those hard parts that are preserved.
That's what we typically see.
- [Narrator] But lots of living things don't have hard parts like shells or bones.
Fossils of soft-bodied creatures are extremely rare but they have been found.
One of the most remarkable discoveries in paleontology was made here, at a quarry in Waukesha, Wisconsin, just west of Milwaukee.
It was here, in 1984, that amateur paleontologists and avid collectors Ron Meyer and Jerry Gunderson came to dig for fossils.
- A fellow collector who was with the Wisconsin Geological Survey showed us a slab like this full of trilobites, and it blew our mind.
We said, where did you get that?
He said, "Oh, we were on a field trip "to this quarry in Waukesha."
Man, we were motivated because we've never seen anything like that.
So the next weekend, we were off to this quarry, and there was this very thin layer of rock that was largely dark and had varving, which are little lines that indicate that it had been set down and multiple times and it split.
And I opened it up and I saw this animal, which we call the hellgrammite animal.
And it was a beautiful soft-bodied creature that nobody had ever seen before.
I said, Jerry, come over here quickly.
And he said, "Oh, my God, this is amazingly significant.
"We got to collect this site."
- [Narrator] The fossils were from the Silurian period, which ended more than a 150 million years before the first dinosaurs appeared.
- The Sulurian is a period of geologic time and the silurian layers in Wisconsin were laid down between 440 and 415 million years ago.
And during that period of time, most of the state was covered by this large ocean.
- [Narrator] It was a truly remarkable find, and a thrilling moment!
- We were so excited we couldn't believe that we had actually found a Lagerstatte, as it turned out.
A Lagerstatte is a fossil site that's preserved the whole ecosystem.
It was like the wildest dream any fossil collector could ever want.
You couldn't get any better than this.
- [Narrator] But at the moment of discovery, there was little time to celebrate.
The pressure was on to collect the fossils before it was too late.
- Now, this was an active quarry.
So parts of this layer were actually going to be blasted.
And so over the course of a month, they went out and continued to collect this material, to salvage it and save it for research and science.
- [Narrator] Thousands of fossils recovered from the quarry are now housed here, at the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum, in Madison.
- These are the specimens of the Waukesha biota that we have on display here in our museum.
I really like this leach fossil because it looks exactly like what you would expect it to look like.
In particular, if you look very closely, you can actually see the little individual segmented rings on the leach's body and even its mouth parts are preserved.
This is an early Wisconsin resident.
One of the neat things about these fossils that come from the areas around where we live is that these animals were swimming around in an ocean that are now our backyards and streets and sidewalks today.
- [Narrator] The most mysterious thing about these fossils is how they were preserved in the first place.
When an animal dies and is buried by sediment, its soft parts are rarely preserved.
Hard parts of animals most commonly become fossils by petrification, permineralization, or replacement, all processes in which water leaves behind minerals, gradually transforming hard parts like bones and teeth into a stone-like material.
- In the case of the Waukesha, the preservation was a little bit different.
And because of that style of preservation, we could see soft parts.
And those soft parts include soft tissues of the animals.
And they also include some of the internal structures.
- [Narrator] This different process of preservation is considered "exceptional" or "extraordinary" preservation.
And it's the reason the Waukesha fossils were in the quarry, waiting to be dug up.
- The difference between exceptional preservation and a more typical fossil preservation would mean the difference between getting to see this leech fossil and seeing nothing at all.
So when these were first found, it was a pretty remarkable find.
And at the time it was unknown what conditions led to this kind of preservation.
Well, research suggests that the preservation was actually highly aided by the presence of microbes.
- [Narrator] Back during the Silurian Period and sometimes even today, tiny beings formed what are known as "microbial matts."
These are communities of microorganisms that form in layers, and we have them to thank for preservation of the Waukesha fossils.
- This large column is a Winogradsky column.
And these types of columns were developed as a way to study groups of bacteria and how they interact with each other.
What's neat about this column is that the bacteria living inside it are actually from the same groups of bacteria that would have been living in microbial mats on Earth three billion years ago.
- [Narrator] You might have heard of the green stuff at the top of the column.
It's cyanobacteria.
- When we think of cyanobacteria today, we tend to think of the more problematic kinds, like the blue green algae that we have to look out for in our lakes and waterways.
But when the first cyanobacteria appeared on Earth about 2.8 billion years ago, they started producing oxygen.
And it's because of that cyanobacteria that we have an oxygen in an atmosphere that we can live in.
We owe a lot to cyanobacteria.
- [Narrator] It's microbial mats like the one in this column that preserved the creatures we now see in the Waukesha fossils since the Silurian Period.
- They were getting stuck to these microbial mat surfaces.
And that actually aided in their preservation.
Sediment would also stick on top of them.
And then those microbes would actually aid in the precipitation of minerals and those minerals would create a hard film that would help to preserve those animals for hundreds of millions of years.
- [Narrator] The skeletons of dinosaurs and mastodons are dramatic, but on their own they only tell part of the story.
But the truth is that most life on Earth has been composed of soft tissue, and fossils like these, preserved by microbes, help expand our view of our region's prehistoric past.
- That exceptional preservation shows you soft parts of animals that you otherwise wouldn't see any remnants of whatsoever.
And this gives us a much larger picture of what life was like in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest during this period of time.
- Thanks for watching.
For more on these stories and the Great Lakes in general, visit greatlakesnow.org.
When you get there, you can follow us on social media or subscribe to our newsletter to get updates about our work.
See you out on the lakes!
(melodious instrumental music) - [Narrator] This program is brought to you by: The Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Laurie & Tim Wadhams.
- [Narrator] The Consumers Energy Foundation is committed to serving Michigan from preserving our state's natural resources and sustaining our future to continuing business growth, academic achievement, and community involvement.
Learn more at consumersenergy.com/foundation.
- [Narrator] The Richard C. Devereaux Foundation for Energy and Environmental Programs at DPTV.
The Polk Family Fund.
Eve & Jerry Jung.
The Americana Foundation.
The Brookby Foundation.
Founders Brewing Company.
And viewers like you.
Thank you.
(melodious instrumental music)