You never know what you’ll find with submarine
By SARAH SUTSCHEK - ssutschek@nwherald.com
Cully Pillman bought a submarine off eBay to pilot along the bottom of Geneva Lake.
“I’m the Toys ‘R’ Us kid; I like unique and fun stuff,” Pillman said. “I fly in powered parachutes; I’ve got all kinds of exotic things, and the one thing I didn’t have was a submarine.”
Pillman, who spent his summers growing up on the lake, said that what was at the bottom always had been interesting to him. Geneva Lake is the second-deepest lake in Wisconsin, measuring 152 feet deep, 3 miles wide, and 9 miles long.
According to the Lake Geneva Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, what’s on the bottom includes a 1950s-era cabin cruiser, a Volkswagen, and several sizable ships.
The 115-foot Lucius Newberry, a steam paddle boat, sank after a fire Dec. 9, 1891, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society Shipwreck Database. The hull of another steam paddle boat, the 98-foot Lady of the Lake, also remains at the bottom of Geneva Lake after being abandoned and finally sinking in 1896.
In the mid-1990s, when eBay had just started, Pillman heard about a Russian submarine on sale for $1 million. But the price tag was too hefty, so he kept an eye out for a more inexpensive one and eventually found it in Canada. The sub had been used in a quarry where people would pay for rides.
Pillman and a friend went in on it together. They headed up north with two trailers – one for the sub and another for the 35-foot tanker that came along with it.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources didn’t have a submarine registration category, so it’s listed as a 10-foot boat with a cabin and an electric motor. Three people can fit inside.
Pillman said crawdads will see him coming and stick out their claws like they’re ready to fight.
“The way you know you’re going to find something is the fish population explodes around you,” he said. “You’re coming up on things, and everything is surreal. The best way I can describe it is that it gets kind of eerie.”
Aside from old beer and soda bottles and boat parts, he came across an umbrella popped open and sitting on the lake bottom like someone had set it there.
Cribs, the structures that help hold piers in place, are a common find because they are easier to drag out than remove them from the water, Pillman said. They attract a lot of fish, he said.
There also are piles of coal and rocks as big as hot tubs, Pillman said.
“The top is scraped by a glacier,” he said. “It looks like a tortoise shell with all the scrapes.”
Pillman mostly leaves what he finds, such as old wineglass-style rowboats from the 1800s, although he once tried to bring up some anchors.
“A lot of stuff we mark in our heads so we can show other people,” Pillman said. “If you look back at the boats, some are lying on the bottom, to go mess with that would take away from the fun of it.”
Different areas of the lake have different kinds of bottom, with mushy mud in some parts and gravel in others.
The submarine can last only about two hours before it needs to be recharged, so exploration is slow-going.
Neither Pillman nor his friend had any lessons on how to pilot the sub. They learned by trial and error over about a month, he said.
“I used to be a lifeguard, so I can hold my breath if there’s an emergency,” Pillman said.
There was one close call when they didn’t monitor the air level closely enough and ended up plummeting to the bottom, sinking into the mud.
“We were talking like Donald Duck because of the pressure,” Pillman said.
Thankfully, the reserve tanks were there to get them back up to the surface.
“That was a heart-thumping three minutes,” he said. “That was the first month we had it.”
Pillman has yet to check out the bigger ships that have sunk to the bottom of Geneva Lake.
“We know where the big ships are,” he said. “I’m not overly enthusiastic. There’s so much other stuff. Someday, I think, but other people have been down there, though.”
