County Hiring New Contractor To Remove Beached Boat

Deep Thought aka S.S. Minnow. Photo taken April 23, 2025 by Graham Kilmer.

Milwaukee County plans to remove Deep Thought, aka the S.S. Minnow, from the public shoreline next week.

At least, the county will try. The most recent attempt to dislodge boat, which ran aground there last October, ended in failure.

On April 23, Jerry Guyer, a professional marine salvager and owner of Silo Marina, attempted to winch the boat out of its resting place with a small pontoon barge. It didn’t work, and the Lake Michigan waves pummeled the pontoon, beaching it next to Deep Thought.

Now the county is taking a crack at it. Milwaukee County Parks is bringing on a contractor to remove the boat. Lincoln Memorial Drive will be closed on Tuesday, May 6 between Lafayette Hill Road and E. Water Tower Road for the removal operation. Northpoint parking lot near Bradford Beach will also be closed.

Sup. Sheldon Wasserman, who represents the are on the Milwaukee County Board, told Urban Milwaukee that Parks is working with a towing firm that the county has used for other things in the past. “So we’re going to do it through the land… over the rocks,” he said.

Though, the goal of removing the boat in one piece remains the same, Wasserman said.

The boat has become a local attraction since the owners Richard and Sherry Wells, of Mississippi, ran it aground after running out of gas looking for McKinley Marina. But, for public officials like Wasserman, it is also increasingly becoming a source of anxiety.

“I think there’s a safety concern with people just climbing on a boat that’s falling apart,” he said.

The supervisor is worried someone will hurt themselves climbing around on the boat. Or, worse, that someone will drown if they fall off the boat during dangerous water conditions.

“It’s just becoming a real magnet for an accident that will happen,” he said.

What’s more, having a boat on the public shoreline slowly falling apart — at times with the help of vandals — presents environmental concerns for the supervisor.

“It becomes like an environmental hazard when this thing starts falling apart, and it breaks down, and we start having fragments of steel and wood and fiberglass and various parts of that boat littering our beaches,” he said.

Mayor Cavalier Johnson made an announcement last week that an anonymous donor would fund the boat’s removal, but Guyer was unable to remove it.

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