Hello everyone! Here’s my update on the implementation of the plan I shared with you a few weeks back. The weather hasn’t been cooperative, with lots of rain mucking up the watershed and followed by intense heat and humidity the last week and a half. At this writing in mid-July, I see signs of the river clearing but the creeks are still spewing muddy water with tree limbs and such. The bad news is that the wreck site is at the mouth of a creek, Bryant’s Creek.

But I still have sonar, with which I can “see” through muddy water, but the images are somewhat blurred from scattering of the sound energy. With that I can see that the evidence of America have not moved since last November. I used the same Deep Vision side scan sonar to make this confirmation. I have also been able to switch to the Garmin down scan sonar to refine the GPS location of the features. What follows are four images that show my progress.

1. The big picture. This is an overview of about a mile of the Ohio River. The Indiana show is on the top and Kentucky on the bottom. The brown stripes are side scan sonar images that I made last fall along the Indiana-Kentucky border. The dual mouths of Bryant’s Creek are on the Indiana side (upper left). Note the features, which are illuminated by the sonar to the left and right of the bright green line. This is the location where I think the ship lies. Also note the lack of features on the longer strip to the east. The thin bright lines on the bottom of both scans are the tracks of my boat and tow fish, moving west to east.

2. Let’s zoom in. Here’s a closer look at the western image at the mouth of the creek. The labeled red triangle markers are features that interest me. They range in length from a few feet to many. The width is difficult to measure but are small. The shadow lengths indicate they are generally 1 to 4 feet high. Expand the photo if you can.

The white line is the Indiana/ Kentucky state border. The orange line is a 300-foot scale which is roughly the hull length of America. The green line is perpendicular to the travel of the tow fish and 250 feet in length.

This debris field is pretty much the same as the America’s length. If I’m right, the hull is right where it was reported; pushed up on the 1868 Indiana bank at the mouth of Byrant’s creek. This is about the 35-foot depth contour at the modern pool of the river. Remember, the river is 35 feet deeper today than in 1868. The 1868 Indiana shore can be made out by the shallow water indicated at the top of the sonar image. At that time the state line was in about 6 to 12 feet of water.

3. Down scan for accuracy and precision. This week I went out and used my boat’s down scan sonar in this area. Down scan sonar reflects the river bottom directly below the boat. Here’s an example. If I see a feature, I can mark it and capture its latitude and longitude.

I made several east west passes looking to find the objects that I saw on the side scans from last fall. There were lots of them!

4. Comparing Scan Types. This last image is a Google Mymaps that shows the same area as the second image. The satellite image seems to be from late winter or early spring of this year and it shows the muddy water.

The marks with white diamonds on a red circle are same as the labeled red diamond marks from the second image. The blue bubbles are features that were marked on this week’s down scans. The GPS positions for these down scans should be a bit more accurate than the side scans due to the setup geometry of the boat, bottom and sensor positions.

Now I’m ready to give them a look with the ROV. Hopefully, my next post will have some visual images of features that may be from America herself. Which me fair weather and clearer water.

So, here’s a brief update for all of you, old and new subscribers to this newsletter.

The river condition is the determining factor on the start of operations. A rule of thumb for this century is that the 4th of July when the Ohio River becomes stable for the season. That means that the spring currents relax and the flotsam thins. That rule of thumb is more or less on schedule this year.

In the middle of the last century, it seemed like it was in pretty good shape by the second week of May.

That said, I am preparing. I’ve been readying Instinct, my “research vessel”, with new bottom paint, routine maintenance and some minor outfitting changes. I’ve got a plan of attack, outlined above, to first confirm the sonar images of last fall. I’ll follow that up with ROV dives with video recordings and precise geo-mapping of the bottom features we seen on sonar. By fall, the most interesting sites with be visited with dives. Success awaits.

Stay tuned and wish me luck!

My off season activities generally include deepening my research and prepping and upgrading my gear. Last year, my “gear” meant my boat with new sonar and a high end trolling motor. But this year, with my great confidence in last year’s sonar images, it means some SCUBA gear upgrades. Success this year will be defined by confirming the wreck find with dives and perhaps starting an underwater survey.

In the course of gear shopping, my wife uncovered the big surprise. Patty was in the local dive shop to buy me a gift certificate; she mentioned my America project. One of the people there ran a quick interweb search and said something along the lines of “Oh, yeah, here it is. America was found in southern Illinois in 2000.

Whaaat?!!!

Had I been there I would have protested with something like “You mean southern Indiana, right?” and he would have said “No, it says here America was found in southern Illinois in 2000.” It was a good thing I wasn’t there because a heated argument may have erupted.

Sure enough, as often as is the case in life, two things can be true at the same time.

The remains of a flatboat, not a steamer, was found on the Illinois bank of the Ohio River near Mound City, Illinois in September 2000. It was found during a low water period, and the landowner gave permission for an investigation. Jim Schwegman, one of the finders, brought it to the attention of archeologists of the nearby Southern Illinois University. They prepared survey of the wreck in 2002 during that year’s low water period. One of the work products was a book, The Wreck of the America in Southern Illinois A Flatboat on the Ohio River by Mark J. Wagner.

Naturally, I bought and read the book. Let me fill you in.

A flatboat is a large raft that west bound settlers used to carry families and their households to the trans Allegheny land of opportunity after the Revolutionary War. This continued through the 19^th century. Think of Tom Sawyer and Jim’s raft from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, only bigger. These were built upriver and floated to their destination downriver. Unpowered, they were one-way transport and were often dismantled for their lumber to build a homestead. This particular flatboat was named America by its 21^st century investigators after a nearby river village, America, Illinois.

Among other things, the SIU team was investigating the interesting historical hypothesis that this craft was raided and sank by river pirates operating out of nearby Cache Creek. They were also interested in the construction materials and techniques used to make the raft. Cookware, crockery, flatware and hand tools were recovered during the excavation. They concluded that it was from the early 19th century and likely sank due to a failed joint in the raft’s stern. The book includes extensive discussion of the boat building techniques of the time.

The wreck site is in the extreme lower Ohio River valley (western), below the lowest Corp of Engineer’s lock and dam at Olmstead IL. This spot is only about 10 miles from Cairo, IL, where the Ohio joins the Mississippi River. It’s nearly 1000 miles from Pittsburg, 360 miles from Louisville, and 500 miles from Cincinnati. These distances make me wonder from where the pioneers set out and where they were headed. They must of been very close to their destination when she sank. Heartbreak.

Estimates say there were as many as 100,000 flatboats on the Ohio River during the 18^th and 19th centuries. I’m sure that many were wrecked like this America. I’ve heard what I’ll call a rumor that there’s a flatboat wreck in Ohio in Boone County, Kentucky. Maybe I can find it.

Post 26.2 Arabia in the Mud

Here’s a story to share from my off-season ruminations and study.

Last month my brother Jim and I took a road trip to Kansas City. What would take “Muddy Mark”, as my daughter likes to call me, to Kansas City in January?

As you may know, the Missouri River, a/k/a the “Big Muddy” runs right through KC and between the states of Kansas and Missouri. About 500 yards from the riverbank on the Missouri side, is the KC City Market, which includes the Arabia Steamboat Museum.

The steamer Arabia, according to the encyclopedist Frederick Ways, was a side wheeled, wooden hull packet built in Brownsville PA in 1853. She measured 181 feet in length and 35 feet on the beam. Deck to keel, she was a mere 5.5 feet. Arabia was propelled by two steam engines, one for each paddle wheel, that were powered by three boilers. She was first owned and operated on the Missouri River by Captain John Shaw, who sold her to Captain William Terrill. On the 10^th of August 1856, she hit a snag, i.e. a sunken tree, and sank near Parkville, MO, just upriver from Kansas City. She was reported to be carrying a large cargo of whiskey upriver to a pioneer town in the Dakota territory. Numerous unsuccessful attempts were made to salvage her.

Eventually, the Missouri meandered, as it does, and the wreck became covered in mud and dirt. After a century, corn was growing on her grave. But her corn liquor legend lived on. In the spring of 1974, a group of explorers were reported to have found her grave using a magnetometer, but no salvage or identification efforts were made. A decade later, a pair of intrepid KC businessmen, took up the challenge. Bob Hawley and Jerry Mackey, a HVAC contractor and restaurateur respectively, learned of the Arabia legend and basically asked: “why not us?” In short order they recruited another friend, David Luttrello, who was a heavy equipment operator. They would need him.

The team procured a magnetometer and permission from the landowner, whose consent when something like “if you want to waste your money, go ahead” -after the fall harvest, of course. The team located the bent magnetic field that indicated large masses of ferrous metal underground. They planned a great dig. Cases and cases of Kentucky whiskey were a short distance below their feet.

Excavation began. It didn’t take long to strike water. Lots of it. No matter, it was nothing 20 drilled wells with 20 diesel powered water pumps couldn’t handle. At one point they were pumping 20,000 gallons per minute of groundwater back into the Missouri, over a half mile away. Occasionally I enjoy a little bourbon and branch water, but these guys seemed a little obsessed! They seemed to have worked around the clock until 26 November, 1988, forty five feet down, they found her!

But there was no whiskey! What they found was enough hardware, building materials, clothing, foodstuffs and such to supply an early version of a Walmart. Lacking any whiskey to toast their find, they pivoted. They dug up all the cargo and ship they could and did the exacting and tedious work of restoring and preserving the goods. After three years of work, they founded a museum at the City Market in downtown Kansas City, exhibiting what they hauled out of the 300-foot-long by 45-foot-deep mud hole.

Kansas City here I come!

Besides the incredible cache of goods, the museum has bits of Arabia herself. This is what brought Muddy Mark and Brother Jim to the KC in January. I was particularly interested in seeing the bits of the hull on display to get a feel for what I hope to lay my eyes and hands on this coming summer. As I’ve written before, I don’t expect to find America’s machinery because it was salvaged in 1870, but the steam engines and boilers on display at the Arabia museum were fascinating.

The museum exceeded my expectations. First, most of it is underground. Nice touch! I came to see the large section of the stern, including the rudder, on display. I wanted to see the construction. The massive number of artifacts are well displayed. They have a paddlewheel, a reproduction I think, spinning in a stream of water. The original engines and boilers are refurbished and featured. There is a well-produced film with fantastic photography documenting the team’s extraordinary efforts. Perhaps best of all, you can visit a lab where researchers are actively restoring artifacts and are willing to answer questions.

The museum with certainly worth a visit if you can make this year because it’s life is limited. It was sad to learn that the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City will be closing in November of this year, 2026. I’m afraid that they’ve lost their lease with the city of Kansas City. Jim and I were lucky enough to discuss its future with the grandson of one of the founders, Bob Hawley. The family is considering some options for a new location, but the future of the exhibition seems very uncertain when we spoke. It would be sad if Arabia and her cargo were buried in a warehouse somewhere.

Roll the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Perhaps it would be better to put her back in the mud.

5 February 2026

Last weekend, Hop and I made a visit across the river to an FC Cincinnati event. With all the recent freezing temperatures, it wasn’t a great surprise when we saw that the Ohio River was beginning to choke with ice. About 1/3 of the width was frozen over. We haven’t felt any temperatures above 0 deg C (32 deg F) for a couple of weeks, and a good number of those days have been near or even below 0 deg F (-18 deg C)! As I sit here in our warm home thinking and scheming about continuing the search for America this summer, likely July or later, I am reminded of the crazy weather nearly 50 years ago in this valley when I was a teenager.

The winters of 1977 and 1978 were brutally cold. So cold that the Ohio River froze over in each of those years. There was full ice coverage – enough to halt commercial river traffic. I believe the previous such closures occurred in 1959 and again 1963, as well as many times earlier in the 20^th century.

In years of ’77 and ‘78, I remember these river freezes well. I was in high school and very involved with the river, boating, and diving. I even had a boat cleaning service – for above and below the waterline. The 1977 ice was about 6” to 12” thick and Louisville – and I’m sure elsewhere – residents were warned to stay off the ice. As the title photo shows, some Cincinnati residents ignored any warning they got.

They did in Louisville as well. I recall vividly talking about it to my oldest brother Bob when I answered the rotary dial telephone when he called from Colorado to chat with our parents. He asked, “what’s going on” and I told him that the river was frozen over and people were walking on it! Some had fallen through but were fortunately saved.

In ‘77, there was a worry that ice melting could cause flooding. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) reassured the public that lacking a simultaneous rain event, they weren’t concerned about flooding, but “the immediate threat would be the abrasive effect of the ice against boats and piers” (see inset article). This didn’t happen get complicated and the Corps was able to manage the river ice without incident.

In the winter of ’78 , there were the frozen river had some long legal legs. The situation did get more complicated. First, the freezing event was followed by an official blizzard. So official that it has it’s very own Wikipedia article. After the blizzard, the weather warmed quickly with rain and fog prevalent. The 12’ to 18” of ice was melting quickly from above and below. This quick melt complicated the Corps’ management options, especially since they operated a hydroelectric plant for the state of Indiana at Markland Dam. Let’s call it an “error in judgement” when they opened the Tainter gates of the dam in on January 27^th . This flow, added with the hydro plant water use, dropped the river level a few feet and resulted in a major ice flow that tore up docks, river terminals, and sunk tow boats in the Markland Pool. This is exactly the situation they were described the previous year.

The commercial operators sued the Corps for damages. The trial resulted in a $2.7 million judgement against the Corps. The tow companies, led by Walker Towing of Paducah KY, had won round one! The mighty USACE was liable. For now, er then, at least.

The US government didn’t pay up and appealed the judgement to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1985. By the close of 1988, the 6^th Circuit overturned the verdict and vacated the award. Something called the Discretionary Function Exception applied. The Corps’ decisions about gate settings, pool levels, and ice management involved policy judgment, not operational negligence. Therefore, the United States was immune from liability. There can be no actionable negligence outside the discretionary function – whatever that means. Even if some actions were questionable, they were still within protected discretion.

Round Two results: Taxpayers/USACE 1 – Tow Companies 1

The plaintiffs appealed to the Supreme Court. In late 1989, the supreme court refused the Writ of Certiorari. They wouldn’t take the case.

Game, set, and match to the Government, eleven years after the event.

During this time, while we in our 20s, Hop and I had left the Ohio River Valley to pursue our engineering careers elsewhere. In 1990, we returned to Kentucky, settling in Boone County. Before long I was back on this section of the river in a brand-new Chris Craft speed boat. Although I was excited to return to the river, I was stunned to discover that the island where brother Gary and I once camped had completely disappeared! Big Bone Island, at mile marker 517 simply wasn’t there. It appears that the 1978 ice flow shattered the island’s integrity and by the early 80s it was washed way. In fact, The 1981 navigation chart shows Big Bone Island as gone entirely from the river. Today, there is no on-site evidence, even on sonar, that Big Bone Island ever existed.

Recently, this history made me consider that perhaps the ice flow had affected the remains of America, which is just ten miles downstream. I have investigated this question, talking to a few experts. They agree, as do I, that an ice flow, even a large one, would be unlikely to scour the river bottom 40 feet down. Ice floats. The scouring, as noted by the Corps expert in 1977 statement mentioned earlier, affects the shorelines and boats on the surface. Deeper structures and detritus will remain under the floating ice. Moreover, the Ohio River is largely a series of 17 lakes, i.e. pools impounded by dams and managed by the USACE; it doesn’t change much from year to year. Even in the pre-Corps area, the features of the Ohio River are fairly stable due to the geomorphology of the valley. This is much less true compared to the Mississippi and other rivers that tend to meander more as well as form and obliterate bars and islands.

Can I dismiss the possibility of America’s hulk was wiped out by the great ice flow of 1978? No, I can’t fully dismiss it. But the sonar images I made this fall seem to show a wide area of debris consistent with some scattering.

This summer, in warm but dark waters in the 80s Fahrenheit, I’ll find out.

In my last post, I mention that I would meet Dr. Begley and we sketch out next steps. We even might take a shot at making a dive or two in the closing weeks for November. This happened, until it didn’t.

I showed Chris my new sonar scans and we reviewed what we know of the history, and we think we’re on it. Checking the weather forecast, we decided that last Sunday, November 16 was our best shot. Saturday was forecast to be warm and very windy, from the west. The river is generally east-west in this area and the and a cold front would we cool the air but lessen and shift the wind to be from the northwest. This front passage was forecast to be overnight Saturday into Sunday. Both days were to be fair. Sunday was the better bet.

My last trip out, the water temperature was about 55 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s damn cold. In a decent wetsuit, it’s probably manageable. As I young man, I had the opportunity to work in water in the forties, but I can still remember the stabbing headache the cold created in my temples. I’m sixty four now. I tapped out and didn’t load my dive gear before I drove the boat ramp. Chris is a better diver than me and has far better gear. He was geared up when we got to the river. As we cruised out, the first reading from the Garmin equipment measured the water at 48.5 degrees. Brrr! It was his turn to use common sense. It’s not only uncomfortable, it exhausts the diver quickly, limiting any work to be done and increasing risk.

So, we did some ROV work and came up with some mods I can make to the ROV to improve its longevity in the muddy river bottom. We also made some really nice images of the debris field that we will use planning for next summer’s diving. I’m excited about it. Colder, denser water is great for sonar imaging!

Something for me to this about this winter is the problem of the silt shroud that covers everything on the bottom. All the ROV images and Mark 1 eyeball observations are hindered my the cursed quarter-inch layer of silt. The robot or a diver is immediately blinded after a fin or fan stirs it up a billowing cloud of brown-green silt. The good news is that the river current sweeps the cloud away in a few minutes, but it limits the expanse of bottom you can look at. It would speed up surveying to wash off a 20’ x 20’ area, let the current do its work and then and drop the ROV or a diver to scan. Send me your ideas!

As tempting as it is to continue to torture the needle in a haystack cliche, I am going to try another approach.

Imagine you have been asked to find an odd-colored brick on a football field-sized patio that is covered with fallen leaves. That one brick is only slightly different in color than all the other brick. You go out and uncover a dozen or so spots hoping to find that odd brick. You get hints but the leaves keep falling and it’s hard to compare one area to another because you can’t seem them all at once. Then you buy a big leaf blower. You go out and uncover the whole scene and in a short time its clear where the find the brick just got a lot easier!

That’s what this new system has done for me. Previously I would scan the site, record GPS points, go back and map them and hope that patterns on the map. This would take many successive trips and map revisions. With my new Deepvision Little Eye, I get the whole picture in a few hours of scanning the bottom while it makes the map for me. I can quickly see the debris pattern.

While the images of the Little Eye are certainly better, it the image and data processing that makes it so useful!

Here’s the map that I was making with the Garmin gear. This is only from this year’s effort.

The points are sonar returns plotted with a GPS latitude/longitude locations and color-coded by date of observation. The density of observations seem to be developing around the blue dots left of center, but it’s hardly precise. But - is it because there’s more debris in that area or because I’ve scanned there more often?

This is the map and with the entire bottom on the new Swedish tow fish from Deepvision in four scans. All at once, you can see the whole picture.

After looking at these images, I see two areas that stick out. Both are at the eastern (right most) mouth of Bryant’s Creek - one to the north and one to the south. (North is up in all these images.)

Here’s the southern one a zoomed in a bit. There some tall features in the area of the red box and an array of objects to the west of it. That’s promising.

I’m more excited about this more northerly area as shown here. The red box here is about the size of America’s hull, 325’ x 44’.

Both of these match east to west with the historical, hand-drawn map from 1868 as well as the contemporaneous reporting of the time.

Which is favored depends on the river level on the night of that accident. A higher river level favors the northern area, a lower level favors the southern one. An contemporary account states the river gauge at Cincinnati, but I can’t corollate that with the level here, 82 miles downriver. The account also states that the current was swift and the weather was rainy, which would indicate a higher level.

My final trip out last week, I dove my ROV on these areas. Here’s some images from the east end of the northern area.

My Bayesian intuition now tells my it’s about 80/20 in favor the northern area. Next step will be to plan out the verification dives and have some looks. I’ll be meeting with Professor Begley this week to see if he agrees and plan the next steps. Sadly, we’ve likely run out of decent weather to do any serious work this year. We may be able to get wet for a quick check in the next week or two, but any serious work will need to wait to next year. Given the spring Ohio River conditions, that could mean July or later.

In the mean time, there a few interesting historical side trails about this story that I can look into and perhaps write about.

Stay tuned.

At the time, I resolved not to dive again until I had a high probability of certainty to dive on the wreck. I am determined to make the next dive in the area on a spot that I had a very high degree of certainty that that dive will produce evidence of the wreck. I realized that a need to spend some money.

I’ve spent over $10k this year on upgrades to my boat, RV Instinct, and to my sonar capabilities with two new systems. I’ve moved the magnetometry down the priority because little of America’s remains are metal. Her machinery was reported as salvaged shortly after the accident.

With my new tools, this season is closing out with optimism, not lament. Here’s some examples.

The image below is a comparison of my two new sonars. I went to a large coal fired power plant a bit upriver from the America wreck sight and scanned a cooling water outfall. It’s a very large man-made structure measuring about 50’ wide (left to right in the image) by 125’ long (up to down) and 7’ tall. I think is a heat exchangers cools and discharges cooling water back into the river from the plant.

On the left is my new Garmin sonar I installed in Instinct in the spring taken at 1070kHz. On the right is an image taken last week with my new Deep Vision Little Eye sonar “fish” at 340kHz. As you can see, in spite of the lower frequency, this Little Eye image outshines the Garmin. The structure, and notably the surrounding riverbed, is in so much greater detail. You can even see the bright plumes of discharge water in the bright white dots.

This increased resolution is due to the higher wattage sonar signal, and more importantly the enhanced signal processing of the Deep Vision commercial sonar fish.

At least as important is the perspective the imaging handling software that the Deep Vision system provides. With the Garmin, I can only take screenshots of the sonar images and plot the points on a map. The Deep Vision system allows the sonar image recordings to be saved and view later in total, as shown below, or even as a movie. This makes finding pattern much more possible!

The software also allows for different views of the data, including the view below, which allows plotting a mosaic of the sonar data on GIS maps such as Google Earth.

If the weather holds and I can get some more river time, I hope that a dive or two this season is possible. As of today, I can say that I’ve cut the search area down from eight to ten acres to less than one. They haystack is shrinking!

Let me back up. An embarrassing number of weeks ago, I wrote the post 25.3 “Target Trouble” that describe my difficulties with my new sonar kit, I can’t find some purposely planted, er, sunk, targets on the Ohio River bottom. I put them there, I looked, er, listened for them and I can’t see, er, hear them. (It is sonar after all)

So, I’ve decided to upgrade to more professional grade gear. On the advice of Brendon Balloid, president of the Wisconsin Underwater Archeology Association, I’ve purchased a Swedish-made Deep Vision LittleEye. This is a towable sonar “fish” that promises clearer sonar images in shallow water due to it’s higher wattage, greater sampling rate and towable depth.

I decided to do this around the first of August, but with European vacations, making shipping arrangements, creating funds transfers and discovering who pays the tariffs (it’s me, by the way), it’s nearly here!

This was not a small financial commitment for a quirky hobby. I hope it finds America pretty quick, but not too quick. That would be like buying a G. Loomis Asquith 690-4 All Water Fly Rod to catch a bluegill. But if I find her and it generates some local news, perhaps I can start an Ohio River Archeological Association or some such. Certainly there are hundreds of wrecks in the 800 mile course of the river. Or maybe I open a anchor and evidence recovery business, like Muddy Mark’s Stream Sleuths. Who knows?

I expect a learning curve for the new kit and I need to assemble some support components, so the find may not be instantaneous. But I’m sure I’ll be able to get out on the river during October. Wish me luck.

Stay tuned.

Something important has happened since my last post. I have either learned that I cannot find America with my new sonar kit, or I have been blessed with a clue that may unlock the knowledge needed to find her. Time will tell.

Review and Background

Briefly, let me offer some review and background. In previous seasons, my principal tool to search for the wreck has been a Hummingbird sonar designed for use by fisherman. This was decent gear, but it had limitations in terms of data handling and scanning. Boat handling with my old trolling motor was difficult.

In my study during the winter season, I learned a lot about side scan sonar, principally from YouTube posts presented by a group called Great Lakes Shipwreck Research. Based on this new knowledge, I upgraded my sonar kit to modern Garmin gear and replaced my bolt-on trolling motor with a Garmin Force Kraken, which can integrate with the sonar gear and is route programmable. With this I can create search routes and easily and precisely run scans.

An other key part of this education was about sonar frequency. For this post, I’ll spare you the physics lesson and gory details. Here’s the bottom line.

Higher frequency sonar gives images with better resolution (detail) at the cost of lower penetration (range).

I bought a sonar transducer with higher frequency. My new kit is a Garmin Echomap UHD2 9” SV Chartplotter with a GT56-TM transducer. The transducer mounts on the transom of the boat and emits sonar energy directly down, called down scan, and perpendicular to the boat’s direction of travel (both sides), called side scan.

My plan is twofold: 1) calibrate what we see on the sonar screen with scans of purpose built objects of known dimension and 2) use the new kit to grid-scan the approximately 30-acre area and log all sonar anomalies. With some luck, the image of America’s hulk will emerge as the image of the sidewheeler W. L. Crane has in this recent find of on the Fox River in Wisconsin. If we’re not so lucky, perhaps the data from the grid-scans, plotted onto a GIS map, will reveal areas of interest for subsequent investigation.

Sonar calibration targets

I’ve constructed three styles of sonar calibration targets from treated lumber. The simplest is a wooden cross in a bucket of cement. This one has the intent of presenting a very identifiable image on the sonar screen.

The second is flatter and broader like we may find the bare bones of the ship as in the Lake Hoptacong case. With this we can test the scanning capability of objects with very low profile.

I am concerned that the tall cross design is vulnerable to falling over in current or a slanted river bottom. This would make these low profile targets too. So, I’ve created a third style of object that is more complex but will not fall over. It’s a “jack” construction that should be at nearly three feet off the river bottom.

Here’s the important finding.

Thus far, I’ve not been able to attain good sonar images of these objects at either high or low frequency.

Yikes! This means that finding low profile objects is beyond my upgraded sonar capabilities, or, I’ve uncovered a feature of sonar in the muddy Ohio that makes it different. In other words, I’m afraid that the high turbidity of my river is scattering the sonar energy. There’s a lot more to say about solving this problem, but that’s for future posts.

Progress with Scans

Despite this, I am getting sonar returns from the new gear. For the moment, I can only conclude that these returns come from objects that are higher profile and/or larger, i.e. greater than three feet in length and four inched in width, than my calibration targets. So, I have proceeded to scan the area and gather sonar return locations and images. I expect we are about halfway complete and have logged nearly one hundred locations of interest in three trips on the water. Here’s a live map that I’m keeping of the locations.

Wish us luck.

Acknowledgments.

I want to thank my collaborators who have helped so for with this season’s effort. Mike Wolff has been my map guy with prompt responses to my hairbrained requests. Charles Wolff, Joe Cordonnier and Mike Folsom have served as field crews and consultants for construction and signals theory. Most importantly, I need to thank my wife Patty. When we retired, she joked that she “married me for better or worse, but not for lunch”. Yet, she is my smartest thought partner, the most skilled and reliable crew for time on the water – and she makes a mean lunch.

When I got home, I awoke Patty and told her we needed to go to the ER. When we arrived, I was taken back immediately and given an EKG. It came back negative for a heart attack. This was good news to be sure, but the doc stated that the false negative rate of a EKG for cardiac arrest is high. He ordered a slower but more reliable blood chemical analysis that would take about an hour. It, too, came back negative. At this point I felt like I was out of the woods because I understood something called Bayes’ Theorem.

They admitted me to the hospital anyway.

Imagine my ire two days later when, after several more very expensive heart tests including imaging and a stress test, the medicos concluded my heart was fine. Don’t get me wrong, I was pleased to have a good heart work up, but that was a steep medical bill.

No wonder health care spending is 17% of GDP.

Bayes’ Theorem

Bayes’ Theorem is a math tool ⁽¹⁾ that takes an initial estimate of the likelihood of an event and updates this probability as new information comes into play. Moreover, it’s the underlying math for a mindset known a Bayesian Thinking.

In my medical case, when the pain started, I figured it was 50/50 that this was the real thing. In Bayes Theorem, that’s called the prior probability with P = 0.5. Fifty percent.

Let’s apply Bayes’ theorem. After the first test, the probability of a heart attack given a negative EKG (false negative rate of 35%) dropped the likelihood of a heart attack nearly in half to 29%. At that point, the prior probability is now P = 0.29. After the negative blood test (called troponin level) with a false negative rate of 5%, my chance of heart attack was like 2%. Don’t get me wrong, I was NOT pulling out a calculator out of my hospital gown and running the numbers. I did, however, have a feel for these probabilities, and I knew the chances that I was having a cardiac event were diminishingly small.

What does this have to do with finding the wreck of America? That’s the subject of this Field Dispatch for paid subscribers and collaborators. I think I got lost with a bit of “gold fever” last year when I found some new evidence, those magnetic fine metal particles. I lost sight of the bigger picture. What do you need when you’re lost and need your way somewhere? A good map! We’re making a probability map!

Footnote (1)

Bayes' Theorem is expressed mathematically as:

P(A|B) = [P(B|A) × P(A)] / P(B)

Where:

· P(A|B): The probability of event A given that event B has occurred.

· P(B|A): The probability of event B given that event A has occurred.

· P(A): The prior probability of event A.

· P(B): The probability of event B.

This formula helps refine the probability of an event based on new evidence, making it a powerful tool in statistics, medicine, and decision-making processes.

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The spring and summer search season is warming up, so here’s an update on my plans. If you’re a new subscriber, or in need of a refresher, I urge you to go back and read the previous posts (I promise they are quite short!). As a reminder, most update posts are free, but if you want to support my project further, a paid subscription gets additional posts, called Field Dispatches, that get into the nitty gritty details of process and equipment I’m using. Of course, I’m extremely grateful for those of you who chose to support the project. As you’ll see in this post, I’m moving ahead with some expensive upgrades to my gear for this summer’s work.

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Getting you up to speed

Bringing you back to my thinking, it’s become painfully clear that I can not find this wreck by diving on every feature found by sonar. The engineering problem goes like this. How does one find the bones of a one hundred fifty-seven-year-old shipwreck in five acres of riverbed that’s covered by forty-five to fifty-five feet of murky, moving water? It’s the needle in a haystack problem with blinders on and the wind blowing straw in your face.

Currently, I am searching for the wreck of America in a five-acre river bottom area. Due to murky waters, each dive only examines 400 square feet, meaning it would take 545 dives to cover the entire area. Therefore, I need to use surface sonar to identify potential sites, confirm these with visual or magnetic techniques, and only dive at the most promising locations. This requires systematically qualifying and ranking the most probable sites.

This is my third season of serious search for this wreck, and it’s had its highs and lows. In the first season of 2023, we identified some interesting sonar returns and investigated them by diving on them as the season closed. We came up with nothing. We did find that the bottom was sandy with small rocks and that was encouraging.

Last season, we continued the strategy of finding prominent sonar anomalies. Then we visually inspected them with a submersible ROV’s onboard 4k camera, and then magnet-fished the area. This method involved significant technique development, including ROV piloting, location projection, and logging of observations. We found what I’d describe as a rubble field that had a lot of iron filings. We even found a rusted artifact that turned out to be a pair of 6 stranded twisted iron cables bolted together. Could it be from America? It’s hard to say, but a late season dive basically yielded nothing but a few river stones in the area. The optimism of the mid-season was dashed.

Sonar and Navigation upgrades

During my off-season studies, I focused on sonar technology and learned much from Great Lakes Shipwreck Research. One key point was to use a higher frequency sonar to increase resolution.

WARNING! Brace yourself for a brief physics lesson! Higher frequencies in energy waves, like sonar, mean shorter wavelengths. Sound energy interacts with matter of similar size, and shorter wavelengths provide clearer, more detailed images. I've been using a maximum frequency of 800 kHz with my old sonar kit. This spring, I’ve replaced and upgraded my sonar kit to 1200 kHz, the highest available for consumer sonar kits. I am hoping for photo-like images of the river bottom this year!

The second great learning from studying sonar is that the environmental and vessel conditions are crucial for good imaging. A slow, steady course is crucial for the best data acquisition and not “smearing” the image. My past imaging technique has been to operate my 115 HP outboard motor at idle and manually steer the boat on a straight a course as possible. To upgrade performance, I’ve purchased and installed a new Garmin GPS-enabled 24 volt electric trolling motor. This will allow me to cut the vessel speed by at least half and auto pilot the course. I can even program patterns and “anchor” the boat with the touch of a button.

The new kit also dramatically improves my mapping and data logging abilities. The new sonar imager/ chart plotter integrates with the trolling motor, so from one station I can monitor the image feed and record data. Further, due to the positioning of the sonar transducer and the outboard motor, I could only reliably scan to the starboard side of the boat. Now, I can raise the outboard motor and scan both directions, doubling my data intake.

Calibration

Finally, understanding sonar environmental impacts such turbidity, turbulence and temperature effects, has caused me to realize that I have been lacking calibration to judge the image quality. As a solution, I’m going to plant a few calibration objects of known size and shape on the river bottom. At the beginning of scanning, I will imagine these objects. With this, I’ll understand better what I’m looking at with the images I obtain that day.

Here's a preliminary sketch of what I have in mind. I’ll make two or three of these and sink them in the riverbed and check them out at the beginning of each search day.

Memorials

People occasionally ask me why I’m looking for this wreck and what I’ll do when I find it. For Professor Begley, my archeology partner, the answer is “we’ll do archeology” and learn something about the people who travelled the river in mid-19^th Century America. I can certainly get behind that and it will be fun. But for me, it’s just a little more personal. There will some 74-river people who died in this accident. I love the river, and my father loved this river. When I began to think about these calibration crosses, I realized what I want to do when we find the wreck. I’d like to plant 74 crosses on the river bottom in their memory. That way, some future river explorer with a sonar set can come visit the site.

In the 1950s the America’s skeleton was apparently covered forever as the opening of Markland Dam raised the pool above the charred timbers. The ghost, however, materialized briefly in 1967 when some barges jammed the Markland gates. The river level dropped to an all-time low and a ship’s skeleton was clearly visible near the Indiana shore. Three Cincinnati divers went down to investigate, but returned to shore unsure of what they had found. None could verify the wreck as America”

Martin Pedigo - Courier Journal Magazine, December 1, 1968

These lines, from a centennial feature article on the accident, have haunted me since I’ve read them a few years ago. If I could only find someone who saw this ghost in 1967! I’ve searched for and spoke to local old timers on both sides of the river who might remember seeing America at the time. I’ve even tracked down the son of one of the three Cincinnati divers who tried to find the wreck. All that yielded no direct testimony of the location of America’s grave. Alas.

What I have found is a photo. It’s an aerial photo of the area of the wreck, taken by the US Army Corps of Engineers during the Markland low water incident Pedigo mentions happened in 1967. The Corps took these aerial photos at the time of the incident presumably to document the condition of their works along the river during the low tide. This, and the other images, are at U of L’s photo archive.

This photo was taken from a plane flying over southern Indiana. The bright white areas along the road are parking lots and a Corps-built boat ramp just east (left) of the bridge in the center of the photo. The photo is taken looking southwest across the Ohio River with the Kentucky bank at the very top of the image. In the foreground is Indiana Route 150 running east-west and Bryant’s Creek is seen running from right to left, under the highway and then bending back to upper right. The mouth of the creek is just off the image at the top right.

For further reference, here is a comparison of the historical photo versus today (as arranged from Google Earth). You can see the low water in the 1967 image reveals the creek bed versus today, where the flooded creek is a bayou.

I see no ghost. At least I think I don’t. Under magnification, one can make out some small dark objects the river lined up about parallel to the bank. No bones. No ghosts. Just dots. I’ve shown this image to a few photography experts and they do not see anything definitive either.

The CJ Magazine passage above is the only evidence I have that the wreck was seen during the Markland barge incident. Did the photographer just miss capturing the wreck while focusing on the boat ramp? Was the photo taken before the wreck emerged or after it was re-flooded?? Did Mr. Pedigo simply make up this ghost story??? Is it true that ghosts don’t appear in photographs????

If any of you would like to take a look at a higher resolution image and want to magnify and examine on your screen, I invite you to message me or comment below and I’ll send a link. More eyes are on the problem is better!

The area of these phantom dots is within the hypothesized eight acres of my search, but not where I found the metal objects and filings last summer. That is 400 yards further east (left) and at the left edge of the old image. We scanned and dove in this general area of the dots in 2023 and found nothing but sand and a few river stones. Nevertheless, I’ll give this spot some more attention during this summer’s scanning.

Onward!

Coming soon…. my plans for searching in 2025.

Hello returning readers and welcome new subscribers.   Thank you for joining as the search for America continues.

First, here’s a quick apology for leaving y’all on a cliff hanger and not posting for the past six weeks.   I’m sorry.   My puny excuse is that I’ve been really busy with several house projects and a redirection with this particular project. 

The redirection is that I’ve spent my scant river time over the last month refining a technique to be able to estimate with some precision, say +/- 10 feet, the position of the submersible when it photographs an object.  That way, if I see what appears to be a man-made object, I can come back later, drop anchor, and dive on that object to inspect it.   This effort is somewhat technical and necessarily boring, so I didn’t think it would make for very interesting reading unless I found an object of interest.

Let me back up. 

 You may recall that last summer and fall we conducted several dives on spots of interest and found very low visibility and a sandy, featureless bottom.    A fluvial desert.   At the time we were searching closer to the mouth of Bryant’s creek on historical reports from the time that America settled “near the mouth” of said creek.

So, over last winter,  in anticipation of the 2024 effort, it was clear to me, considering the extremely poor visibility, that we need to find the wreck using “from the surface” search techniques and save diving for final identification. 

I reviewed the testimony of the 1868 pilots and plotted a box on a map the likely position of the wreck, given the position and velocities of the steamboats before and following the collision.   This summer, starting in July, I began to survey the area defined by this box with my submersible vehicle’s camera.   I found an area of debris in the middle of the probability box that showed a great number of objects, rubble or debris if you will, in contrast to the “desert” we observed last year.  That’s where I was when I made the last post and hence my redirection to work out the positioning technique.

After three or four technique development missions, I have a pretty good method which involves towing a float from the ROV, taking a range and compass bearing to the float from the boat, and then some math to project the position, expressed in latitude and longitude, of the submerged vehicle.   It’s a three-person job: an ROV pilot, a data logger and a search director.  

Two search missions yielded a couple hours of video to review, but no real hot “objects of interest”.    I was hoping to relocate an item observed on one of the earlier missions in the summer.  The one is this video clip from August 7th.

That brought me to this week, the middle of October, without a latitude and longitude on which to drop an anchor and have a peek.   While the weather has been fantastic, the water temperature has dropped into the high sixties.   As a young man, I’d dive with ice on the water’s surface, but I’m getting too old for that “stuff.”  Dr. Chris Begley, my collaborator on this project, has not been available, so I decided to go solo and take a shot based on the best available information.

So, I made a SWAG for the location of the large straight-edged object in the photo.   I figure it could be somewhere in a 400 square yard area based on the position of my boat on the day of observation and a typical swim pattern of the ROV without the attached float.  Also, I worked out a search design I figured could search about 35 square yards in a 30 minute dive.  So, my odds of picking the spot to find the object were about 1 in 11.   I practiced the motions of the search pattern, taking bearings with a compass in my back yard.   The pattern looks something like this.

With that, I loaded up my dive gear and Patty and I went out on the river on Thursday October the 17^th.  It was a sunny, gorgeous day in the mid-60s with almost no wind.   Over side I went, with Patty standing by topside.  

With so little recent rain, the current was very slow, at about 0.5 mph or about 9 inches/second.   I went down the anchor road to reach the bottom, at about 50 feet. 

 I could only see a few feet.  There was a very thin layer of silt on the rocky bottom.   Contact with, or a wave over the bottom created a silt cloud that reduced the visibility further.   Here are a few screen grabs from the video I took to give you an idea.   

The silt cloud, along with some mask/ eyesight issues, left me unable to read the compass reliably.   I had to abandon the pattern search in favor of just “having a look around.”   

I could confirm the large number of rocks, which we did not see on last year’s dives in the other locations.  I take that as a good sign.   I found no metal but did find an object of interest.   My light passed over a flat object that looked like tile with a distinct line that looked painted on.     I put it in my “treasure basket.”   After about 30 minutes, I was getting low on air and time, so I returned to the anchor and ascended.  I think Patty was glad to see me surface.

Here's the flat piece.  Have a look at it.

It is clearly of mineral composition.  The distinct line does not look natural and appears only on one side.  The thickness is very regular, at ½ inch.  One corner is a 90 degree angle.  It measures about 6.5 inches by 3 inches.

At the same time, there were other more rock-like objects with similar coloring in the area.   Also, the distinct line is not orthogonal or parallel with the sides of the right angle.

Is it man-made?  Beats me.   At least I have something to work on over the winter.

I have lots of questions.  How about you?

It’s been two weeks since my last post and let me start with an update on something mentioned there.  I showed you this image of an object that I dragged up with a magnet from my suspected wreck site.

Since then, I’ve put the artifact in a hydrolysis cell to reduce the corrosion and now I can identify it.  It’s not a nail!

Here’s some images that tell the story. 

So, it appears that is two, small diameter, stranded iron cables joined by a fastener that appears to be a small U bolt.  It is likely part of a longer cable with the end formed into a loop for attachment.

Is this part of America?    My answer is perhaps, but not certainly.  

It was found in the area mentioned in post 24.1 where the wreck likely lies.  Wire rope was  invented by a German mining engineer in the early 1840s and by 1868 was in wide use around the world.  X-ray diffraction analysis show that this artifact has a very high iron content, greater than 98.5%, so it is not made of a modern alloy like stainless steel.    As you can see from the photos, the amount of corrosion was great, so it’s been in this location for many, many years.   The fastener is consistent with what would have been used back in the day, not a crimpled metal band like we do today.   So, I don’t see anything that would rule it out, but given the small diameter, it certainly is not part of the hog chains which were used as structural support for the hull to deal with the weight of the boilers and engines. I wish I could say its convincing evidence, but it’s simply not.  At best, it is supportive.

I’ve been out on the water only a few times over the past two weeks, with other life priorities superseding.  But I have a couple more hours of bottom video to look over and I am making progress on the method to plot the submersibles course and match that to the images I see.   The area I am looking at currently seems to have more silt-covered features than we saw just a few hundred yards west last year.  That’s encouraging and I believe these two sites, about 300 feet apart, are worth diving on.   I expect to do that in October.

In the meantime, I need to decide whether to continue to film these two areas or to broaden the search and move to other spots in my high probability zone.   Homing in pursues the hopes of finding more convincing evidence and pinpointing dive locations while broadening offers greater coverage.   It all hinges on the probability is strong enough that these are observations of America’s wreckage. Time is running short for diving, and I want to spend my river time productively. I[m interested in your hunches.

In closing, perhaps some of you saw the article in a recent  Wall Street Journal about Steve Libert, the retired security analyst who has been on an almost lifelong search for Le Griffon, French explorer Robert La Salle’s ship, which was lost in Lake Michigan in 1679.   I certainly identified with most of his experience.   But unfortunately for him, he’s run afoul of Michigan officials and has experienced some “legal hardship”.  Yikes!

I will be putting out a field dispatch for paid subscribers this week detailing the search technique and videos.

First Up – Thanks!

I would like to take a moment to thank you for your interest in my Substack.   I mean this sincerely. This has been a fun project for me, but I hope you are enjoying it as well.

These “Field Dispatches” are intended for my good friends that have supported this project financially with paid subscriptions, to help me buy gear for the project, and for those that have spent hours out on the river with me and act as my collaborators on the project. .  I try to give the paid subscribers a more information and a little sooner, so they get some extra value for their extra support.

So, special thanks to my paid subscribers, these field dispatches are for you.  You get the very latest and the nitty gritty information.    I especially want to hear what you think about the problems I’m solving.

And, of course, thanks also to all of you who subscribed for free to just find out what’s going on.   Your support and thoughts are equally important. You’ll get the same story in due time, hopefully delivered with a little more polish and with a higher level of certainty.  

Anyway, I have a couple of things to deliver to paid subscribers.   This is basically a companion and expansion to the just published Post 24.2.   Read this first for context.

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Hello again from the office of  searching for America!

A great deal has happened on the search since my last post and I’ve been busy on other projects as well.  Consequently, I didn’t get a post out last Sunday.  My apologies!    My last article outlined my new approach to topside searching and underscored that the next time we dive, we want it not to be a search but rather a final discovery of the wreck.    Today, I can say that I think we are getting warm!

As of mid-August, we’ve been out on the river five times with our sonar, visual and magnetic tools. Each time we put in two to three hours of effort.   We’ve established the “blue box” on the boat’s GPS and confirmed two interesting sonar anomalies from previous years within it.   Both sites are on what appears to be the 1868 shoreline and are about 300 feet apart.

Magnetic probing has revealed, in most spots, significant quantities of very fine particles of what appear to be iron filings.   I’ve checked with several river scientists, and all have agreed that this is not to be expected.  An EPA geologist suggested that it could be sand blasting residue from somewhere upriver.   The nearest upriver commercial river terminals are a sand and gravel quarry, 13 miles away, and at the East Bend Power plant, three miles further.

Even more interesting, one magnetic jig fished up an object!  

My initial reaction was that it is a broken-off planking spike like I mentioned and pictured in the last post.   My teammates are a little more skeptical, while the head is nail -like, it is pointed on top.  It would not receive a hammer blow well. Good point, I say (ouch pun!).   What do you think it is?   Put guesses in the comments!

Visually, video footage shows this area to be unlike the other areas of the river where we dove last year.   As reported then, the bottom is sandy with beds of small river stones like you use to line a garden border.     In this area, we see larger objects, obscured with a thin layer of silt.  Some could be natural objects, but others are clearly man-made.    Have another look at the video I posted last time.   What do you see in this short clip (comment below)?  I have a couple hours of video like this.

While this is all very exciting, I’m trying to keep my skeptical scientist’s hat on.   I’m checking all these things out rigorously.   I’m running chemical elemental analysis on the artifact and “magnetic silt” with the help of the Thomas More University chemistry department.   Hopefully we can date the object based on its alloy composition.    I’m also putting the artifact in an electrolysis cell to reduce the corrosion.  Maybe 24 volts of electric energy will help clear up what it is.   Right now, I can say that is magnetic, man-made and has been underwater for a very long time.

Thanks for your interest in this Melvillian project.  I hope that soon I can tell you that we’re moving on to the next phase!

Welcome back! It’s August 2024 and the search for steamer America has resumed!

I say “resumed” but, of course, it hasn’t really stopped for me. But the active search has resumed on the river. Over the downtime, I’ve stayed busy off the water. If you recall from my December 2024 post putting this feed to bed for a while, I had plans for the off season. My goals were to:

1) refine the search area with a fresh look at the available history and,

2) upgrade the search technology to improve the probability of finding the wreck when we suit up to dive on it.

I think I’ve made significant progress on both.

Refining the search area

I searched in vain for a photo of the exposed wreck or detailed description of its location. I did find some aerial photos of the general area taken by the Corps of Engineers during a low water incident in 1967. You may recall that it was reported that America emerged from the depths during this incident. Alas, the wreck site was tantalizingly out of view from the nearest photo.

The University of Louisville photo archive staff was helpful to me, and they have a fantastic display of Louisville history in the basement of the Eckstrom Library - check it out sometime.

However, I dredged up a copy of the inquest report that was printed in full in the Cincinnati Enquirer in February 1869, two months after the accident. It looks like this:

With the aid of a large computer monitor, I was able to read the testimony of the pilots, Napoleon Jenkins on America and Jacob Remlein on United States. This information allowed me to plot on a map the position and velocities of the two boats prior to collision.  Knowing the displacement and velocities of the two vessels, I was able to calculate the momentum changes and predict their headings after the collision. My calculations matched their testimony. Check!  This allowed me to draw a box of high probability on a modern map and this is where we will search this summer.

Here’s the map…. sorry if you can’t sort it out precisely. The blue icons show the positions of America different times during the night of the disaster. Red is for United States. The bottom line is the dark box in the center is the likely location of America’s remains. That’s the search area. I hope to have an animated map for you in the future.

Improving Our Tech

Our goal is to be able to identify and qualify debris locations before we bother to suit up with dive gear. We want a high probability that we’re going to find the wreck when we submerge. This is needed because the extremely low visibility makes it impossible to see well enough to search a wide area given the limitations on air supply and bottom time. So far, we’ve only used sonar (sound) scans to identify potential dive locations

We’re adding the capability to use other methods of underwater discovery besides sound waves, namely visual images and magnetic probes. I’ve gotten a Gladius Mini S remotely operated vehicle (ROV) that sports a 4k camera and seriously bright LED lamps. We’ve named it RINGO. It does a surprisingly good job of gliding along the bottom and recording video. After viewing the initial footage Dr. Begley and I agree that the ROV does a better job of scanning the bottom than a human diver. Don’t worry, we won’t lose our jobs to the ‘bot, we’re still in control here.

Here’s a very brief video clip of the river bottom and what we’re seeing.

It does, however, require a skilled ROV pilot to maneuver it. I’ve spent many hours practicing in pools, ponds and even the ocean. With that, I rate myself as ROV Pilot 2nd class. That said, on the river, I’ve decided I need to have a dedicated, skilled pilot instead of me, so that I can manage the search and perform other crucial tasks. For the recent initial searches, I recruited my longtime friend and retired USAF colonel Mike Folsom to take the controls. Mike entered the crash course (no pun) and subsequently ran the ROV on the first couple of runs.  He did a fine job.  My son Charlie will be taking the training next. It’s a job cut out for a millennial.

As far magnetic search methods are concerned, there’s some progress here too. While America was of wooden construction, there should be many metallic object left behind. In particular, think nails - more like spikes actually. Fasteners to hold the hull planks to the frame. Here’s a photo of the iron spikes found at the wreck of the steamer Alice Dean that are on display at the Howard Steamboat museum in Jeffersonville Indiana.

A quick word about metal detecting technology. I first had to learn the difference between a “metal detector” and a “magnetometer”.

A metal detector is a basically a coil of wire at the end of a stick and when you wave the coil over a metal object, an electrical current is induced in the coil and a sound can be produced. Think of a soldier’s mine detector or an old fool like me at the beach. A metal detector is not a sensitive as a magnetometer..

A magnetometer is a device that measures the earth’s magnetic field using a Hall effect sensor. Basically, these Hall sensors can measure the two components of the vector that make up the magnetic field, which bends in the presence of metal. These Hall sensors are more sensitive and penetrates soil deeper than the sweeping metal detector. An iPhone has a hall sensor and you can make read and the magnetic field using an app called CrowdMag. It’s pretty cool!

By this summer, I had hoped to complete a build on a towable magnetometer that can run seven Hall sensor scans simultaneously, creating a magnetic field “heat map” of a scanned area. Alas, I haven’t overcome the technical challenges of the build, so I am reverting to some low tech hillbilly engineering, i.e., a magnet on a string. A/K/A magnet fishing. Naturally, I wouldn’t be me if it was not a nice piece of kit. It is a powerful neodymium magnet banded in 304 stainless steel with a braided nylon chord. It works surprising well. Here’s a photo.

The Search Resumes

So, I’m back out on the river in a new search area, looking for clues with a new approach and a more probable area. In the weeks to come, I’ll update you on what we’re finding. Which us luck and stay tuned!

As always, I’d love to hear from you. Don’t be shy! Comment below.

When I published my last entry in October, I warned you that I’d be slowing posting frequency for the time being as I took some time to travel and close out the year.   In that post I pointed out when we resume dive operations, we need to be in a position to dive on only the highest probability locations.  So the task at hand is to be able to survey the site with precision and to narrow the search area.  

 As I look into the New Year, I have a clear view to what’s needed to resume the search in 2024. Diving on the site is still months away.   River conditions for the first half of the year are far too poor for dive operations.   By July, I want to be in a position where we have a location, or a very few locations, that we can dive on with great confidence that we will confirm the wreck discovery.

That means two objectives:

1. Narrowing the search area by continuing the study of the history and geography

2. Improving the survey technology to find the most probable location within the search area.

Narrowing the area

Right now we have winnowed the area down to about 5 acres through some excellent topographic work by my nephew Michael Wolff, a GIS professional, and my brother Gary, a river engineer.  Through this work we found an underwater shoal that was likely there in 1868, and indeed, seems to show on the hand drawn map.   This could be the bar that America came to rest on as she burned.   

I continue to believe and hope that the US Army Corps of Engineers has some records or images of the wreck site.   My next stop is University of Louisville Archives and Special Collections Repository where the USACE Louisville District archives are held.  There are 38000 negatives with 5 volumes of image indexes.   I sure hope they are well indexed!

Improving the survey technology

Nearly all the scanning of the search area has been done with the Lowrance Hook 9TS fish finder with side and bottom scan.  It is good kit for what we’re doing, but it has yet to find the wreck!

It’s time to up our game. I need to get a easy way get close up surveys of the bottom visually and magnetically. To my great surprise, my wonderful son and wife gifted me a modern “high hobbyist” remotely operated vehicle (ROV). 

Paid subscribers may remember I built an ROV several years ago and spent some significant time last summer trying to reactivate it and make it useful in the search.  I abandoned that effort because it was difficult to drive.   This new unit, a Gladius Mini S, is modernized with excellent lighting, good telemetry, a grabber arm and a 4K camera.  I’ve seen videos of it working in very low visibility with good success. It also has an attachment point that I can equip it with additional instrumentation.   For that, I intend to build a small magnetometer array, so that I can identify magnetic anomalies, look at them and perhaps even retrieve objects.   Here’s the plan for a terrestrial magnetometer that I plan to adapt to submarine use.

What am I looking for?  Nails.  Lots and lots of nails.  Other metal parts to America may be present as well.   The strategy will be to investigate sonar anomalies already plotted as well as the entire bar mentioned above. Failing finding objects, I hope to make a “heat map” of the magnetic field as shown in the plan document.

I’ll close with a couple of other notes.

First, the S+D Reflector, a publication of the Sons and Daughters of Pioneer Rivermen,  just featured an article about the insurance claims on United States and America.  It seems the US Mail Line Company, who had more than 50 years of accident free operations as well as great confidence in the routine route between Cincinnati and Louisville, only covered America and United States for “loss by fire only”.  This provision reduced the annual insurance premium paid by at least half (five percent vs. ten to twelve percent).   Well, the insurance companies argued that the loss was due to collision, not fire.   This argument was adjudicated up to the Ohio Supreme Court, who ruled in the insurers’ favor. 

Secondly, many of you have asked me what we expect to find?  John Leuzsler, an old friend from DuPont, sent me an article from Roxbury New Jersey local news that shows the skeleton of small steamboat sunk over a century ago.   This image is exactly what I think we will find.  Hopefully this summer!

As always, you reactions and questions are welcome!

mcw

Dear Reader.   

While you have been reading the accident history posts over the past several weeks, I’ve been on the river trying to find the wreck of America while the weather and river conditions allow. We’ve been out there on three full diving expeditions as well as several more scanning and video missions. These trips involve a boat ride with friends or family on a beautiful part of the Ohio River, so each has been a great day. However, these weeks have been a bit of an emotional ride for me, with rising expectations falling into disappointment when the dive doesn't find America’s remains. My hope resurges when we evaluate and apply what we’ve learned and then the cycle repeats.

The diving season has ended, so today I summarize what we’ve found (and haven’t found) and discuss my plans to continue the search next year. Thanks for joining me on the journey by reading these posts. I won’t be publishing weekly for now, but I will pop into your feed from time to time with updates.  

If you’re a paid subscriber, I am especially appreciative and I hope you’ve enjoyed the detailed field dispatches and invite you to participate with your thoughts and questions in the chat. That said, I would understand if you suspended your sub for now.   

If you’re a free subscriber, I would be appreciative of your support because, as you will see, I need to spend some money to design and build a research tool to improve the chances of finding America.

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mcw  8 October 2023

As described in my earlier post, The Search so Far, by mid-August of 2023 we were in a position to begin diving on promising locations to find the sunken America. These are in an area just above the mouth of Bryant’s Creek, Indiana above Warsaw, Kentucky. A Google Mymap is constantly updated with new notes and shared amongst my collaborators. Here’s a sample.  

 Between August 26 and September 23, Dr. Chris Begley and I conducted a series of ten dives over three expeditions. We were accompanied each outing by a third member as a safety.  These were, in order of the expeditions, my brother Jim Wolff, my friend Joe Cordonnier and finally Dean Love, who is a friend of Chris. Dean is a documentarian from New York with an accomplished career in TV and film. He and Chris met in Honduras during the filming of a documentary called The Cave of the Glowing Skulls. Dean directed the film. Chris was one of  the archeologists.

The first set of dives brought some very good news. We found the visibility to be better than expected. Check out this video from Chris’ Facebook feed that shows it pretty well. Better still, we found the bottom to be as hope for; it was all sand and small river stone. This means that the wreckage is unlikely to be buried in the bottom. Rather, we should find it resting on the hard surface. Subsequent dives focused on various likely spots for the wreck, but the river conditions (i.e. visibility)  seemed to deteriorate over the weeks.

As we searched and learned more, it was clear America was not going to reveal her ghost so easily. I knew we had to get smarter about where we were diving. Lucky for me, I have some family experts to fall back on. My brother Gary is a consulting river engineer, and my nephew Michael is a GIS professional. Mike studies maps and makes them for a living. The three of us put our heads together and compared the current and historical bathymetry with river morphology. Woven into this analysis was the best understanding we have of the movement of the vessels during the accident.  We created a “high probability” search area, five acres in size.  

With the coming of colder and swifter waters, we are done with underwater searches for the year. We have learned much and are undaunted. There’s much more to learn and do over the winter and spring to prepare for next year’s search season. During a dive, we have the light, time and breathing air resources to search about 100 to 200 square feet. One hundred square feet is about 0.02 acres. So, we need to be real smart about where we choose to dive or else be prepared to make up to 250 dives to cover the five acres or we need to significantly narrow this search area.

Reflecting on what we’ve learned.

• We have a good handle on the history and a rudimentary model of the boats’ movements during the accident.

• We have a good understanding of the river bathymetry from the early 20th century.

• The nature of the river bottom is advantageous to our search.

• Water conditions are poor and variable; yet visibility can be adequate to conduct a small area search.

• We have a five-acre area where we are reasonably confident where the wreck should be.

Areas to improve or learn more.

•  These last dives occurred after an extended period of dry weather, yet turbidity increased over the course of six weeks. Why? What are the best predictors of decent diving conditions?

• We need to be able to pinpoint likely wreckage from the surface or from research so that when we dive, we are on a location with a high degree of precision.

  • Can we build  a better scanning system that can be conducted from the boat?  This might include a lower angled side scan and/or magnetometer/metal detector..

• Is it possible to get better historical information? For example, does the USACE have records somewhere such as its archive at the U of L library or are there any salvage records from the S/V Underwriter somewhere in Cincinnati? (Underwriter was the salvage vessel for United States’ hull). 

• Can we improve our low-vis underwater search technique?  For example,

  • Would backlighting a large area during low turbidity be effective?

  • Would area line dragging be effective?

  • Could a “dive rally” search be organized and be effective?

Thanks again for your support! Here’s a montage of images from the searches.

Dean Rolls. Video by Mark Wolff