r the dive was possible or safe.
“I had over three years of effort, lots of money invested and probably 1,500 hours of personal time dedicated to this endeavor and, really, all I wanted to do was dive,” McClellan says. “Once all the activities were complete and our divemaster gave us the ‘gear-up’ command, I was like a five-year-old going to a candy store.”
At around 10 a.m., McClellan and Morris dove into the Big Blue, slowly descending through The Lake’s layers until the sunken vessel came into view.
“It took about 5 to 7 minutes to descend from the surface to the bow,” McClellan says. “Everything went silent. A state of immense pride set in, a reverence for what we were seeing began to seep into my thoughts. My diving and filming were all muscle memory; I just enjoyed the 10 to 20 minutes on that ship and absolutely hated to leave her.”
The ship is “in great shape,” McClellan says.
Still intact, with its aft air funnels warped from the impact with the floor upon sinking and the subsequent slide down the Glenbrook shelf, and the roof, cabin and pilothouse gone, the boat still retains many features apparent from historic photos.
The boilerstack is standing and the boat tilts only slightly to its port side.
Treasure hunters who found the wreckage in the 1960s and used a grappling hook and a pulley system to salvage collectible pieces of the ship caused minor damage.
“You can also see gouges and chunks of wood removed from the teakwood rails,” McClellan says. “But aside from that, the violent event the SS Tahoe encountered on the night of August 29, 1940, and the early morning hours of August 30, 1940, has been overcome by her as she sits proudly on Tahoe’s bottom.”
The dive would be the first of many trips to the bottom of Glenbrook Bay (a total of four in 2002). McClellan would not only set a record for the depth of a high-altitude dive, but would draw the interest of the Nevada State Preservation Office, which would go on to name the SS Tahoe as the first maritime site in the Silver State to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
With funding from the Nevada Division of State Lands, New Millennium Dive Expeditions executed dives from 2009 through 2011 for the purpose of gaining additional footage and providing detail for a map that charts the wreckage site.
“During these dives, we were able to create a bathymetric image of the SS Tahoe and in that image, we located the point at which the SS Tahoe hit the bottom as we found a debris field directly above the wreck site in 335 feet of water,” McClellan said. “This is where the SS Tahoe violently hit the bottom, breaking off the bow structures, and then laid down and slid some 150 or so feet to her present resting place.”
While New Millennium Dive Expeditions has plenty of laurels to rest on after accomplishing the astounding feat of exploring the sunken SS Tahoe, McClellan and some of his partners continue to use SCUBA diving as a means of broadening knowledge about what lurks beneath the surface of Lake Tahoe.
The nonprofit entered a partnership with University of Nevada, Reno limnologists to provide scientists that study The Lake with personal observations of underwater conditions from the surface down to about 450 feet.
However, McClellan will always be closely tied to the first dive down to the SS Tahoe, thereby performing a feat of historical alchemy, transforming the fallen and lost glory of a bygone era into a surer, more durable glory by replacing the allure of affluence with the enticements of adventure.
Matthew Renda is a Santa Cruz–based writer.