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Shipwrecks of Lake Erie

Every Lake Erie shipwreck with a known resting place, 280 in all, drawn over NOAA's survey of the lake floor. Free to download and print. There is also an interactive map where you can tap each wreck.

10,800 × 7,200 pixels at 300 DPI, which is 36 × 24 inches on paper. Any smaller 3:2 size (24 × 16, 18 × 12) prints even sharper.

A map of Lake Erie shaded by depth, from pale shallows in the western basin to deep blue east of Long Point, with 280 red shipwreck symbols and their names scattered across it. A panel in the corner charts how many wrecks lie at each depth.

Tap the map to open the full sheet. The PDF is the same image, ready for a print shop.

Download JPEG, 6 MB PDF 8.5 MB
36 ftmedian depth of a mapped wreck
107of the 280 lie in 30 feet of water or less
198 ftthe deepest, in the trough off Long Point
Close-up of the print around Point Pelee and Pelee Island, with dozens of named wrecks and their years.
At full size: Point Pelee and the islands, where the western basin meets the central.
Close-up of the print off the tip of Long Point, where the lake floor drops into its deepest trough and wrecks cluster.
Off Long Point, the sandbar the lake's sailors called a graveyard.

Why so many

Erie is the shallowest of the Great Lakes, about 62 feet on average, and for a century it was one of the busiest. Wind builds short, steep waves on shallow water fast. Somewhere between 1,400 and 2,000 vessels were lost here. Most were never found, so this map shows only the ones with a known position. Half of those lie in less than 36 feet of water.

How it was made

No single list of Erie's wrecks exists, so the positions were merged from six: NOAA's electronic navigational charts and its AWOIS wreck records, Ohio Sea Grant and the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, ShipwreckWorld, OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia. Two points within 400 m, or the same name within 8 km, count as one wreck. Seventy Ohio records only give an approximate spot, and those are drawn fainter. The Canadian side is thinner than the American one because fewer Canadian positions are published.

The lake floor is NOAA NCEI's Great Lakes bathymetry at 3 arc-seconds, colored by depth in feet with a contour every 20 feet. Each wreck's depth is read from that grid, so it can be a few feet off what a diver would find. Land is from Terrain Tiles on AWS, and the water outlines are from the USGS National Hydrography Dataset. Not for navigation.

Ryan Sajdak, 2026. More maps at ryansajdak.com/projects.