st off Glenbrook, where the boat was born, and glass-bottom boats would be able to observe the grandeur of yesteryear.
The SS Tahoe would serve as a sort of underwater museum, the thought went.
On August 29, 1940, William Bliss stood with a throng of bystanders gathered to watch the family’s beloved vessel sink to The Lake’s floor.
The only problem—a major one—was the engineers in charge of the project, including William Bliss, miscalculated the slope of The Lake floor off Glenbrook’s shore, and the boat sunk and then slid out of sight, taking with it any plans for an underwater museum.
So concludes the first part of the drama. As much as the first installment is about the decline of a family’s fortunes and the vanishing of a gilded age at Lake Tahoe, the second installment is about dreaming wildly, about tempting the impossible, about feats of human engineering as opposed to debacles and, in the end, about peerless accomplishment.
Finding SS Tahoe
Martin McClellan grew up in nearby Reno, but didn’t become fascinated with Tahoe’s depths until later in life.
McClellan admits he knew nothing of the SS Tahoe or three other boats scuttled or purposefully sunk in the early twentieth century. Instead, he discovered the mystery of the SS Tahoe and its maritime graveyard by way of a devotion to SCUBA diving’s technical aspects.
In 1998, McClellan was studying decompression theory, mixed gasses and technical equipment in relation to deep diving.
“I took a technical course and the instructor mentioned his interest in someday visiting the steamer Tahoe in Glenbrook,” McClellan says. “I was shocked. I had no idea there was a shipwreck in Lake Tahoe.”
While he stored that realization away, he and colleague Brian Morris began developing advanced computer software simulating the decompression theory that allows SCUBA divers to delve deeper underwater and stay there longer than ever before.
They soon realized that going deeper for its own sake wasn’t as attractive as going deep for the sake of discovery, of seeing something never before seen.
In 1999, the pair set upon the SS Tahoe as the goal that would not only allow them to test diving’s technical aspects, but would also draw attention and funding to their effort. McClellan established the nonprofit New Millennium Dive Expeditions and began raising funds sufficient to back a complex and equipment-needy project.
“This was intense. We simply wanted a solid and measurable reason to conduct decompression diving at altitude and test our computer theory models,” McClellan says. “But as we got deeper into the initial stages of this project and realized the SS Tahoe was in 350 to 490 feet of water, it became very apparent that we needed funding, and lots of it, to accomplish this very incredible goal.”
Along with money, the growing team of divers needed to iron out one fairly important detail: the precise location of the SS Tahoe.
“There is no way a dive team is going to go out to Glenbrook Bay, take some sort of depth reading or GPS coordinates, enter the water and drop down onto the SS Tahoe,” says McClellan. “We needed to find her, mark her location and establish dive infrastructure that would allow us to drop directly upon the ship without any sort of uncertainty.”
Lockheed Martin Perry Technologies, a California-based company interested in developing Remote Operated Vehicles, contacted McClellan. The company’s research and development team needed some experience in freshwater operations so they assisted McClellan and his team in locating and placing a permanent GPS marker on the location.
After three years of preparation—which included tackling the complexities of SCUBA diving in a high-altitude lake—and assembling a competent team prepared to carry out various functions associated with such unprecedented dive conditions, McClellan and Morris steeled themselves for the initial foray down into the wreckage.
On June 29, 2002, nearly 62 years after the SS Tahoe was scuttled, the two men descended into Glenwood Bay with an admixture of excitement and a great deal of nervousness about whethe