Ken Merryman

Diver, Underwater Videographer

Ken Merryman is past president and founding member of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society. He is a retired computer engineer and a veteran speaker at scuba shows around the Great Lakes. Ken has been an avid Great Lakes shipwreck hunter and diver for 50 years and operated a scuba diving charter service for 40 years. Although his charter business operated mostly at Isle Royale National Park, he also frequents all of the Great Lakes diving and searching for new shipwrecks with his shipwreck hunting partner of thirty years Jerry Eliason. Their shipwreck hunting partnership is responsible for the discovery of thirty shipwrecks and the initial exploration and documentation of a half dozen more including the discovery of the deepest shipwreck found in the Great Lakes the Scotiadoc at a depth of 870 ft. In efforts to preserve these discoveries working through the GLSPS and often in cooperation with Wisconsin Historical Society they have helped add eight shipwrecks to the National Register of Historic Places. In cooperation with the Ontario Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport they have done the initial documentation to list five of the discoveries as archaeological sites. Now their initial documentation includes photogrammetry models and Ken is leading a massive GLSPS project to create and archive photogrammetry models of all Great Lakes Shipwrecks crowd sourced through the diving community. The last six summers Ken and friends have been circum-navigating the Great Lakes in his 1947 Owens Cruiser. He has cruised over 14,000 miles covering most of all five of the lakes sight-seeing, diving, shipwreck hunting and fishing.