Located 9.0 miles northwest of the Port Wing harbor entrance, in the town of Port Wing, Bayfield County, Wisconsin, in Lake Superior, are the remains of the converted fish tug Thomas Friant lies in 293 feet of water. Thomas Friant was launched at the Robertson & Co. Shipyard in Grand Haven, Michigan in 1883. Built for Captain Rueben Vander Hoef, the vessel primarily operated in passenger and freight service on Michigan inland waterways during its early career.

In 1897, the Thomas Friant began to traverse Lake Michigan and Lake Superior as an excursion vessel, taking passengers and freight between ports. In December of 1908, the vessel caught fire while at the dock and burned to the waterline. By 1910, the vessel’s upper decks were rebuilt, and the Thomas Friant was relaunched as a gill net fish tug.

As a fish tug, the Thomas Friant operated on Lake Superior until January of 1924, when the vessel became trapped in an ice floe near Cornucopia. Eventually, the ice punctured a hole in the vessel’s hull and it began to sink. All men aboard escaped in the vessel’s small boat, and rowed to Knife River, Minnesota where they were rescued. Although the sinking occurred relatively far from shore, no lives were lost.

Today, the vessel remains intact and sitting upright on the lake bottom. As one of only a few known and intact, converted fishing tugs in Wisconsin waters, Thomas Friant provides historians and archaeologists the rare chance to study the construction of the vessel, and an early passenger steamer’s conversion to a fishing tug.

State and federal laws protect this shipwreck. Divers may not remove artifacts or structure when visiting this site. Removing, defacing, displacing, or destroying artifacts or sites is a crime. More information on Wisconsin’s historic shipwrecks may be found by visiting Wisconsin’s Great Lakes Shipwrecks website.

Wisconsin Shipwrecks