The Schooner Fleetwing Shipwreck (And What’s Left of It Underwater)
September 26, 1888. A three-masted schooner carrying lumber slips out of Garrett Bay on the west tip of the Door County peninsula, headed for Chicago. The captain misreads the channel between the peninsula and Plum Island in the dark. The Fleetwing piles into the reef at full sail and sinks in eight feet of water. Everyone aboard makes it off. The cargo of cherry-stained pine is salvaged over the next month. The hull is left where it lies. It’s still there, 138 years later, in the same eight feet of water. We’re the only kayak operation that paddles to it. What you can actually see The wreck sits in Garrett Bay, off Door Bluff Headlands, on the Green Bay side of Death’s Door (the strait between the peninsula and Washington Island). Three things are visible from the surface on a…