The Wrecks of West Lake Okoboji, a new coffee-table book by Lloyd B. Cunningham, tells the story of some of the historic launches that have been lost in Okoboji. Hazel Dell burned to the waterline and sank in Smiths Bay in 1927 after a gasoline explosion caught the launch on fire. Her pilot and passengers, some badly burned, were rescued by responding boaters. Miss Thriller, known in the 1920s as the fastest passenger boat in the country, was hit in the dark and sunk by the launch Zipper in 1929. Nine of her 15 passengers died in the accident. And the water taxi Number 30 was sent to the bottom north of Gull Point in 1946 when Isabel II rammed her in the dark so hard that 13 people were thrown into the water. All 13 survived. The Wrecks of West Lake Okoboji tells those stories as it explains why a 15-foot wooden tower is sitting on the bottom of Browns Bay and offers an explanation for why 147 feet of railroad tracks were laid across the bottom of the lake north of Terrace Park Beach. It also tells the story of a 1935 Ford truck that found its way to the bottom of Cass Bay in the winter of 1948. In photographs, graphics and eyewitness accounts, Cunningham takes you along with the divers who have raised launches from the bottom of the lake, two of which are on display in the Iowa Great Lakes Maritime Museum, and the pilots of the submarines that have explored the waters Diver, researcher and writer Cunningham also writes about the history of diving West Lake Okoboji. Beginning with the first diver, Captain H.H. Thompson of Duluth, Minnesota, who reached 96 feet into the lake in the summer of 1930, Cunningham shares the personal accounts of the daring divers of the late 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s who explored the lake in homemade helmets before the advent of scuba diving.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.