My aunt, uncle and a friend sitting on my granddadâs Levis motorcycle. Must be mid 1920s My auntâs still going, will be 101 in June.
Bert Hardy Chinatown 1942
Thread won.
Great pic,guessing you must of been 12 or 13 when you took it
This is the SS Gunilda - a luxury yacht built in Leith in 1897, and sunk 111 years ago in Lake Superior due to a mix of incompetence and idiotic penny-pinching.
Amazing how well wrecks survive in fresh water.
Most of the uncredited shots are likely also Becky Schott.
In better times:
Why do the wooden chairs, table and other wooden items not float? I would have thought they would be at ceiling level rather than still on the floor. I can envisage the table being bolted to the floor but the chairs?
Eventually the water seeps into the wood and replaces the gas (air ?) that normally fills the tiny voids in it. It seems fully waterlogged wood is generally denser than water. People who want to use bits of wood to decorate their fish tanks ask questions about this on the interweb.
So after sinking the furniture would have floated to the ceiling then sank back to the floor over time? If so itâs settled in near perfect position. Iâm wondering if this furniture was weighted with lead or something to to stope it moving easily in rough seas.
Iâm aware certain timber is denser than water, Lignum Vitae for one. My old man calls it bastard wood as it used to blunt all his tools. But in all likelihood that will be on of the more common varieties like teak, oak or maybe even pine. How could it float then land back in position?
Good question. Wiki says that the sinking followed a complete keeling over, to the point where the masts hit the water. All this happened during a salvage operation (she had run aground) and she sank so fast - in a couple of minutes - that they had to cut the tow line to avoid her taking the salvage boat down with her. Youâd expect anything loose to slide a long way in an event like that.
That said, it seems that divers have made visits to the wreck since the late 1960s. I suppose itâs not impossible they put some of the furniture back (sheâs now on an even keel) for the sake of the photos ?
Tis a puzzle indeed. Maybe the mermaids did it. Fascinating how it looks like a moment in time from when the ship went down.
This would shift anything not fixed down. Depending on depth, the hull ballast may have righted the ship before it bedded down.
The foreground in this shot shows what youâd expect the furniture to look like in a sunken ship. Itâs likely, as suggested, divers have done some tidying of the furniture down there.
Itâs a puzzle indeed Watson. Corrected for accuracy.
Things that are supposed to float, donât always.
Me aged 4: [first visit to swimming baths.]
Mother: âDonât worry, youâll float!â
Older kid: [shoves me in]
Me: [goes straight to bottom and lies there confusedly drowning]
I always sank like a stone until I got fat. YAY! Blubber!
Wood can waterlog extremely fast - the sap-transporting âcapillariesâ are perfectly sized to exploit waterâs surface tension to passively draw it up - an effect that works from farthest root-tips to the full height of the tallest tree.
Iâd guess the effect of losing buoyancy would have been gradual, leaving furniture to sink gently to the floor, some chance that some of it righted itself as it did so, but itâs a popular dive site, and - as said - has no doubt been re-arranged for picturesque reasons.