Diving for Treasure

Wearing a 225-lb. suit and helmet. Diver Jack Coghlan, 25, slipped through a hole in the 14-in ice and out of sight in Port Arthur harbor last week. On bottom at 25 ft., he pushed through waist-deep silt to a wall of sheet-metal piling. In 39DEG water he carefully passed his rubber-gloved hands over the foundation, reporting what he felt and what little he could see into a telephone linked with the surface, and thought to himself, "Life could hardly be rosier these days."

As the lakehead's only full-time professional diver, Coghlan was checking the foundation of a grain elevator, a chore at which panicky operators have kept him since the collapse of Port Arthur's United Grain Growers' elevator last September. Five days last week, he was underwater for an hour morning and afternoon on the elevator job. "To break the monotony," he passed up the sure-thing $150-a-day fee on two of those days to look for -- and find -- a 1,800-lb. anchor lost by the government ice breaker Alexander Henry last fall. That treasure made his Superior Diving & Salvaging Co. $650 richer.

Booked Up. Coghlan, who currently lives with his 19-year-old wife and infant daughter in a house trailer parked on the Port Arthur harbor ice, was overdue for some luck. Last summer a sudden Lake Superior gale swallowed Superior's 60-ft. barge, with equipment worth $20,000. Coghlan, fished out after five minutes in the lake, had no applicable insurance, was left with little equipment and $8,000 in debts. Steady elevator-inspection work now has the debts "under control," and Coghlan has bookings for $50,000 more of the same this year. But he yearns to try for the really big money that he is convinced waits for the taking in sunken Lake Superior treasure.

Major bonanza is the Canada Steamship Line's Kamloops, which went down off Isle Royale on Dec. 6, 1927, with a crew of 22 and, says Coghlan, $1,500,000 in papermaking machinery, plus liquor worth $750,000. Coghlan says he found the wreck in U.S. territory last Aug. 6 in 150 ft. of water, three-fourths of a mile off the island. U.S. park rangers chased him off, says Coghlan, and he was on his way to get permission to continue when the storm swamped his barge.

Silver & Jewels. Coghlan also covets Standard Oil Heir William L. Harkness's 2O5-ft. yacht Gunilda, which sank in 200 ft. of water off Rossport on Aug. 31, 1911. Coghlan has researched the Gunilda's last hours, is convinced that $250,000 in silverware and jewels are inside the yacht's rotting hulk. After that he hopes to investigate a promising underwater copper deposit off Rossport. He also thinks he can make money retrieving pulpwood "worth at least $2,000,000" that lines the harbor bottom at Thunder Bay (about one pulpwood log in 20 sinks during rafting and water storage). And if none of these treasures pan out, Coghlan has a hole card. He can always hunt for the 24 more anchors known to be at the bottom of Port Arthur harbor, worth, he says, from $500 to $2,000 each.

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