Wisconsin Fisherman Finds 152-Year-Old Missing Shipwreck, Keeps Fishing

• When a Wisconsin fisherman stumbled upon a 152-year-old shipwreck, he didn’t think much of it.
• Tim Wollak was out fishing with his daughter in Green Bay when his FishFinder showed something unusual underwater.
• Months later, he learned that he discovered a long-lost wreck.

A Wisconsin father who accidentally discovered a 152-year-old shipwreck says when he first spotted it on his FishFinder, he assumed it was nothing special, and just kept on fishing.

Tim Wollak, a 36-year-old salesman from Peshtigo, Wisconsin, told Business Insider he made the discovery while out fishing in about 8 to 10 feet of water with his 5-year-old daughter near Green Bay’s Green Island one afternoon in August.

Wollak noticed something unusual on his FishFinder sonar device, so he swung his boat around to get a better look at it.

The way the object appeared on the small device’s screen made his daughter Henley (who loves The Little Mermaid) think it was an octopus, Wollak told BI.

But Wollak noticed the wooden panels that almost looked “like a human ribcage,” and immediately assumed it was some kind of sunken boat.

“To be honest,” Wollak told BI, “When we saw it, I thought it was cool. But we were in an area where people go all the time, and so I just assumed that people knew about it.”

“So I took a couple pictures, sent ’em some buddies to see if they knew about it, which they didn’t,” he added. “We looked at it and then we drove off and went to look for fish somewhere else. We didn’t really think a whole ton of it.”

It wasn’t until several months later that Wollak learned the significance of his discovery.

Wollak posted about his find on a local Facebook page called Forgotten Wisconsin a few months later, writing that he believed it was the wreck of a ship called the Erie L. Hackley.

And within an hour of his post, he said, someone from the Wisconsin Historical Society reached out to him.

The Historical Society told him they didn’t believe it could be the Hackley, based on its location.

Instead, Wollak said, they thought it was likely the 1871 wreck of a barkentine ship called the George L. Newman, which was thought to have sunk in that area but had never been recorded.

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources gathered video footage on the wreck earlier this month; the identity of the wreck hasn’t been fully confirmed, the Wisconsin Historical Society wrote in a Facebook post.

The three-masted George L. Newman sailing ship was built in 1855 and measured 122 feet long, according to the historical society.

On the night of October 8, 1871, the ship was carrying a load of lumber when thick smoke from the Great Peshtigo Fire — the deadliest wildfire in US history — made it run aground on the southeastern point of Green Island, the society wrote.

The crew was rescued and spent the next week salvaging what they could from wreck, which over time became partly covered with sand and largely forgotten, according to the historical society.

Discovering a lost wreck is pretty cool, Wollak said, but it’s even more special that he did it with his daughter.

“Being able to share it with Henley and have it kind of go down that she was part of finding it is what’s coolest to me,” he told BI.

And Henley is getting her fair share of the credit too, Wollak’s wife Brianna told BI.

“I did get a message from her kindergarten teacher saying that the class is really excited for Henley,” Brianna Wollak said.