The 1906-built Forward launch was one of the first gasoline-powered vessels on Lake George. The 45-foot-long watercraft was initially a recreational boat for the Bixby family of Bolton Landing.
It later served as an excursion watercraft under different ownership. According to local lore, in the 1930s, the wooden runabout sank.
In September 1987, the underwater archaeology team known as the Atlantic Alliance Lake George Bateaux Research Team was founded and I was its director. The unit’s name soon changed to the Lake George Bateaux Research Team and three years later we were known as Bateaux Below.
Besides studying the waterway’s “Sunken Bateaux of 1758,” in the late 1980s, our all-volunteer entity spent time trying to locate a mystery shipwreck reported to be east of Lake George’s Diamond Island.
Our organization conducted scuba exploration over 1988–1989, trying to find the sunken craft. We soon dubbed it, “Farrell’s Phantom,” after John Farrell, one of our research team’s members.
Farrell told us about seeing the shipwreck years earlier during a scuba dive. On our eighth search dive, made on June 4, 1989, the sunken vessel was located by Bob Benway and me of the Lake George Bateaux Research Team.
Six weeks later, on July 12, 1989, divers Dr. Russell P. Bellico and I discovered a few faint letters on the bow’s algae-covered hull. We finally had a name for the enigmatic shipwreck – Forward. That sparked a mapping project by our squad.
Four years later, in 1993, Bateaux Below’s Vince Capone, a remote sensing specialist, in cooperation with SeaScape International and KenMar Graphics, produced a 6 ½ x 8 inches diver’s slate. It was called – “SiteSlate: The Forward, A Lake George Shipwreck.”
The informational aid was for scuba enthusiasts who visited the sunken watercraft that rested on a slight slope in 35 to 45 feet of water.
“SiteSlate: The Forward, A Lake George Shipwreck” was one in a series of SiteSlates fabricated by SeaScape International, KenMar Graphics, and Vince Capone.
A few years ago, Vince Capone recalled that endeavor, a project conceived over three decades ago: “Scuba diving off New Jersey, [where I often worked] is with limited visibility. Divers are confined to their immediate surroundings unless they made previous trips to the site. I wanted to provide divers with a better way to visualize the entire shipwreck. Using side scan sonar imagery of shipwrecks, we generated maps of several underwater sites around the east coast.”
The Forward SiteSlate, however, did not require sonar mapping. Bateaux Below members created a site plan the old-fashioned way, using tape measures, recording clipboards, and underwater photography. Following data acquisition, Saratoga County artist Linda Schmidt finalized drawings of the shipwreck.
The Forward SiteSlate, priced at $9.95, was released in 1993. That was just weeks before the Department of Environmental Conservation, other state government agencies, and several not-for-profit organizations opened the state’s first shipwreck preserve system.
Known as Lake George’s Submerged Heritage Preserves, this provided controlled public access to sunken vessels for the scuba community’s enjoyment.
Each shipwreck preserve had a mooring buoy, underwater signage for divers, trail lines to guide divers around the shipwreck, and a state government-produced informational brochure.
The initial two shipwreck preserves in Lake George were the Forward and a cluster of seven 1758 British bateau-class shipwrecks, the latter often called the “Wiawaka Bateaux.”
Moreover, the Forward SiteSlate introduced in 1993, and the sunken vessel becoming a state-administered shipwreck preserve in September 1993, helped paved the way for the Forward launch to be designated to the National Register of Historic Places; listing date–October 9, 2008.
It was believed to be only the ninth shipwreck site in the Empire State on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Forward shipwreck’s National Register of Historic Places nomination was prepared and submitted by Bateaux Below’s Dr. Russell P. Bellico, Bob Benway, Vince Capone, Terry Crandall, John Farrell, and me.
The case officer for the Forward’s National Register nomination back in 2008 was Mark Peckham of New York State’s Division for Historic Preservation.
Read more about New York shipwrecks.
A version of this article first appeared on the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustrations, from above: The motor launch Forward (courtesy Ted Caldwell); an underwater photograph of the bow of the 45-foot-long Forward (courtesy Dr. Russell P. Bellico); and the front side of a 1993 plastic dive slate for the Forward (courtesy SeaScape International, KenMar Graphics, and Vince Capone).
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