Sea has always called him

Scanlon's Jerry Eliason said he was just a boy when the "Sea Hunt" television series sparked his interest in shipwrecks.

The series only aired for four seasons, but Eliason watched reruns of Lloyd Bridges as former Navy diver Mike Nelson, and he bugged his parents for scuba diving lessons for years. He finally got his wish when he was 12.

"They hired a local diver to give me some training," said Eliason, who grew up in Rice Lake, Wisconsin. "So I got my first dive gear at age 12, and certified in my early 20s."

His first hunt for a "virgin" shipwreck - one never located before - was in 1981, with Kraig Smith of Proctor, who moved to Rice Lake not long after Eliason moved here. The two men have been partners in their unusual avocation ever since, joining forces with Ken Merryman a few years later. Sometimes all three hunt together, other times it's two, depending on who can make it. It was Merryman and Eliason who found the Pere Marquette in July.

Eliason figures he's been part of finding about 25 shipwrecks, mostly in the Great Lakes, counting "half" wrecks. "Those are ones we went and found that had already been found but no location had been given to us," he said.

The former Minnesota department of public safety supervisor said his role has been that of a researcher for the last 30 years.

"My diving days ended in 1989 because I did so much (diving) in the '80s that I got sloppy. I got a case of the bends (decompression sickness) in Lake Superior," he said. Divers should time ascents according to a formula that considers both the depth of the dive and the amount of time spent. The bends occur when dissolved gases (mainly nitrogen) come out in the bloodstream, forming dangerous gas bubbles in the blood stream. His ascent should have taken over an hour.

"I ended up coming up almost immediately," he said. "Luckily my diving companion, Scott Olson, was a true hero. He also got the bends saving me." It took Eliason 10 weeks to recover.

But that accident also sparked a deeper interest in searching for ships that lie hidden far underneath the water, some of them too deep to dive for anyway.

Having a son, Jarrod, who was valedictorian of the Cloquet High School Class of 1992 and an electronic engineer helped, because he built his dad a sonar not long after graduating from college. Using sonar and underwater cameras that Eliason put together, they've had a number of successes, including the Scotia Dock, which they found in 870 feet of water near Thunder Bay.

"We really have a fondness for Lake Superior wrecks, because they don't have those doggone zebra mussels that obscure some of the finer details," Eliason said. The Antelope, which went down in 1890, still had its name shining brightly on the side when they lowered the cameras and lights through the water.

Eliason said there's no money in shipwrecking but plenty of satisfaction, especially when he can make contact with survivors, or descendants of people who were on the ships.

"Some people like to fish, hunt deer or go pheasant hunting," he said. "Well, I hang out with a group where our hobby is finding previously unlocated wrecks."