A Traverse City diver's chilly excursion into Old Mission Bay last week provided an incredibly clear look at one of Lake Michigan's oddest "ship" wrecks — a 1979 Ford Pinto.
"It's a cool thing to go see," said diving enthusiast Chris Roxburgh, who owns an electrical contracting business in Traverse City.
The car, covered in quagga mussels and lake plants, is off Haserot Beach in Old Mission Bay, near the northern tip of the Old Mission Peninsula. And we're not talking a car that was left on a beach that got swallowed by the bay — this is out there, in about 20 feet of water.
"It's kind of a long swim to get out to it," Roxburgh said.
How it got there isn't clear. The car appears to have had its engine and other parts stripped. Some believe it was someone trying to create an artificial reef — it's not far from an underwater log pile apparently constructed for the same reason, to attract perch and other fish.
"The legend is someone placed it there one winter on the ice and it fell through," said Stephen Karas, an instructor with Scuba North dive shop in Traverse City.
Roxburgh said he heard a story that someone dumped the stripped-out car off a pontoon boat.
"It's all conjecture, folklore," Karas said.
Roxburgh did his dive on April 29, before the big warm-up.
"The water was 36 degrees," he said. "I do ice diving, cold-water diving, whatever. The cold water has the best visibility, because there's no algae forming like in the summer.
"I dive with a wetsuit — nobody does that in the winter. But I'm pretty hardy — I can handle the cold."
Conditions were "amazing" the day Roxburgh dove with some other Dive North divers and shot his Pinto video.
"That day, I was told, was some of the best visibility the divers I was with had ever seen at that area," he said.
There's a lot of odd stuff down there, Karas said — a motorcycle, old rowboats.
"Shipwrecks have detailed stories attached to them, histories and dates," he said. "Stuff like this, it just seems to appear. And the folklore arises from there."
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