Shotline Diving – Special Sites & Odd Objects
Special Sites: Aircraft, Vehicles & Structures
Not every story beneath the surface belongs to a ship. Across the Great Lakes and their rivers, aircraft have come down, vehicles have gone over the edge, and docks and shoreline structures have slowly slipped into the water. Together, they form a parallel record of how people moved, worked, and experimented on and around the lakes.
This section gathers those non-vessel sites into one place. Aircraft wrecks and crash locations, cars and trucks, historic docks and industrial structures, and other oddities are all documented using the same Shotline format as wrecks, and linked wherever possible to the Master Wreck Index and the Shotline Wreck Map.
Cross-linked catalogue
Growing coverage: aircraft, vehicles, docks & “odd objects” added as research solidifies.
Aircraft
Aircraft Wrecks & Crash Sites
Aircraft losses on and around the Great Lakes range from experimental test programmes and military training flights to civilian transport accidents. Some wrecks are fully submerged and diveable, others are partially recovered with only fragments remaining, and a few are known only from contemporary reports and search efforts.
Each record documents what is currently known about the aircraft type, the circumstances of the loss, the search and recovery work that followed, and the present status of the wreckage. Where a site has not yet been located, it is still included as a research target, with sources and coordinates presented as working hypotheses rather than confirmed dive locations.
Vehicles
Cars, Trucks & Other Roadway Losses
The presence of cars and trucks on the bottom is usually the result of moments when road and water briefly tried to occupy the same space. Ferry approaches, bridges, winter road crossings, steep shorelines, and simple bad luck have all contributed to vehicles entering the water over the last century.
These entries focus on context as much as hardware: how and where the incident occurred, whether there were associated casualties, and how the site relates to nearby crossings, communities, or industrial areas. These are not artificial reefs in the modern sense, but snapshots of everyday life when something went very wrong at the water’s edge.
Waterfront
Docks, Wharves & Working Waterfronts
Old docks, timber cribs, wharves, and industrial shore structures are the skeleton of the working waterfront. Many shipwrecks in the region loaded or unloaded cargo at these exact sites; in some cases, the remains of a dock and the remains of a vessel can still be visited on the same dive.
Entries describe the original purpose of each structure, its relationship to harbour traffic and local industry, and what is visible today — whether that is a line of cribbing in shallow water, isolated pilings, or a more complex system of slips and wharves.
Oddities
Other Special Sites & “Odd Objects”
Some locations defy simple categorisation: work barges that never quite counted as “ships”, isolated pieces of heavy machinery, experimental structures, or long-forgotten construction projects that now sit quietly under a layer of silt.
These entries tend to evolve over time as new information is found. A site may begin as a single mention in a document or a diver’s note about “something strange on the bottom,” and gradually accumulate enough evidence to be linked to a specific incident, builder, or project.