A 72-year-old Illinois scuba diver died on Tuesday while attempting to explore the S.S. Wisconsin shipwreck about 6 miles off the Pleasant Prairie coastline.
The body of Patrick Kelly, of Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, was recovered Wednesday 125 feet below the surface and on the bottom of Lake Michigan near the shipwreck, the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department said in a news release. Authorities responded to a distress call from Kelly’s wife, who was on board their vessel, after her husband did not surface at the scheduled time.
“The search for the missing diver soon became a recovery operation due to the amount of time that the diver had been missing,” the news release said.
Kelly’s wife made the initial distress call at 11:30 a.m., but by 5 p.m. poor water conditions forced the recovery efforts to be postponed until Wednesday, the release said. Kelly was recovered on Wednesday at about 10:15 a.m.
Pleasant Prairie is a village of about 21,00 people to the south of Kenosha.
Authorities — which included community members, various counties from Wisconsin and Illinois, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the United States Coast Guard — used sonar and several remotely operated vehicles to find Kelly’s body, the release said.
The S.S. Wisconsin sank 1929, after being built in 1881, according to information from Wisconsin Shipwrecks. The website details nine people died after the ship pumps failed to handle incoming water properly during a northeasterly gale. It was carrying automobiles, iron casings and boxed freight, the site said.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Illinois man dies during dive to S.S. Wisconsin shipwreck near Kenosha