Divers with Shipwreck Explorers visit the wreck of the Alice E. Wilds, which has been sitting at the bottom of Lake Michigan about 18 miles from Milwaukee since 1892. Credit: Jitka Hanakova / Shipwreck Explorers

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When the weather turns warm this summer and most people in the Milwaukee area are thinking about enjoying the sunny outdoors, Jitka Hanakova will be dreaming of the cold and dark.

The bottom of Lake Michigan is calling her.

She's itching to dive about 300 feet under the surface again to check out the final resting place of one of the region's newest underwater discoveries: the wreck of the Alice E. Wilds, which has been sitting at the bottom of the lake since 1892.

Last year, Hanakova, owner of Milwaukee-based Shipwreck Explorers, led a team of divers who found and then visited the steamer Alice E. Wilds, about 18 miles out on the lake from Milwaukee.

She talked about the discovery this month in a presentation at Milwaukee's annual Ghost Ships Festival, and when the water gets warm enough to dive this summer, she has her sights set on visiting the Wilds again, with a few remaining mysteries left to solve.

"It was not as difficult to find as maybe some wrecks could be," Hanakova said by phone.

She's been diving since 2000, captaining her boat since 2008 and looking for shipwrecks since 2010. She already had one prominent find under her belt — the L.R. Doty in 2010.

All 17 people aboard were lost when the 291-foot-long L.R. Doty, carrying a cargo of corn, sank in a storm on Oct. 25, 1898. It was found by Hanakova's team 112 years later about 20 miles off Oak Creek, in 320 feet of water.

That discovery led naturally to Hanakova's quest for the Wilds. "This was pretty much the last big ship that went missing here, so we wanted to go find it," she said.

Lake Michigan contains the wrecks of thousands of ships, but Hanakova sees the Doty and the Wilds as unique because of their size, their era and the wrecks' proximity to Milwaukee.

Finding the 136-foot-long steamer Wilds was made easier, Hanakova said, because there was ample documentation of its intended path from Chicago to Escanaba, Mich., and because there was information about the rough location where it collided with the steamer Douglas on June 12, 1892. No one died in the crash, and the Douglas was able to be hauled back to shore. But the Wilds wasn't found.

In their search for the ship, Hanakova's team used a sonar device that detects anomalies on the lake floor that could be shipwrecks. The difficult part is deciding where to search and then going back and forth over the chosen grid until something turns up.

Nothing did on that first day, Hanakova said, and her team was prepared to spend days or even weeks at the effort. Then something surprising happened.

"It was a complete miracle," she said.

On the second day, the sonar picked up what could only be a shipwreck, but it happened so fast they almost didn't notice it. When they took another look, sure enough, it appeared to be the wreck they were looking for.

That was in April. They had to wait until June for the right conditions to check out the wreck up close. When they did, she and two other divers could only spend about 20 minutes at the bottom of the lake, but that was enough to leave them with little doubt that they had found the Wilds.

"We are pretty sure it is what it is," Hanakova said, noting the ship's size and shape and location of its collision hole. "It fits the description perfectly, not to mention there's no other ship like that reported sinking."

Ultimately, Hanakova envisions taking divers down to the ship on expeditions, trips that could attract experienced divers from all over the world.

She's interested in more details about the ship, such as whether it was empty or carrying a cargo of lumber when it went down.

That's one of the mysteries she hopes to solve this summer.

Clarification

This story about the discovery of the 1892 shipwreck Alice E. Wilds in Lake Michigan did not include mention of David Sutton, one of the leaders of the team that discovered and then dove to the wreck in 2015.

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