OLDEST SHIPWRECK FOUND IN LAKE ONTARIO

It was Oct. 31, 1780 -- the Revolutionary War was in full cry -- when the 22-gun British sloop of war went down in a gale on Lake Ontario.
The 80-foot HMS Ontario was just five months old. Yet the storm, no respecter of youth, took her down along with the crew of 40 men, 60 British soldiers and as many as 30 American prisoners of war.
Six bodies, some flotsam and the sail cloth did float to the surface following the sinking. But other than that, the Ontario had just vanished.
Until this past Saturday, June 14.
That's when two veteran shipwreck hunters announced they had discovered the 228-year-old wreck lying in near perfect condition in some 500 feet of water off Lake Ontario's southern shore.
The Ontario is the oldest shipwreck and the only fully intact British warship ever found in the Great Lakes, said Jim KIennard and Dan Scoville.
Kennard is an electrical engineer who has been diving for 40 years and claims to have found more than 200 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, Lake Champlain, New York's Finger Lakes and the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers.
Scoville is a diver who helped develop a remote-controlled submersible with students at the Rochester Institute of Technology. It was used to videotape the wreck.
Experienced wreck divers often will go down and explore sunken ships to depths of 200 feet or so. But almost never go to the 500-foot depth there the Ontario lies.
In 1995, two divers did plummet down to the famed Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior, which lies at a depth of 530 feet. It marked what is likely the world's deepest wreck dive, but their time on the ship was less than five minutes -- virtually no time at all for exploring.
See the book Shipwreck Hunter for the story of the Fitzgerald as well as the breath-catching dangers of shipwreck hunting and diving in the Great Lakes.
Kennard and Scoville found the Ontario using sidescan sonar equipment and explored and videotaped it using the submersible.
The two said they thought of the Ontario as a burial site, removed nothing, but did gather enough video to produce a documentary about their discovery. They did not disclose the ship's location and added they were unlikely to return to the site.
The Ontario had never seen battle, even though it was the biggest British warship in the Great Lakes. At the time it went down, the sloop apparently was being used to ferry troops and supplies along New York's upstate frontier.
The British tried to hush up the sinking, because they knew that Gen. George Washington's troops would not only take heart in the loss, but also strategic advantage of the loss.
But the did look for the lost ship. They looked hard. What they found was little. Hatchway gratings, the binnacle, compasses and several hats and blankets floated ashore the next day. Several days after that, the ship's sails were found afloat. And the next year, six bodies washed up near Wilson, N.Y.
Kennard, who has been searching on and off for the Ontario for 35 years, hooked up with Scoville six years ago. Together, they found seven other ships in the Great Lakes.
Then came their big find. The HMS Ontario, one of the so-called "Holy Grail" shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
(Another Holy Grail Ship, the Griffon, sailed by the French explorer La Salle in 1679 -- 101 years before the Ontario -- may have been discovered in Northern Lake Michigan. But so far, not enough evidence is in to prove it one way or the other.
To the delight of Kennard and Scoville, the British ship was in near perfect condition, preserved in the lakes deep, cold waters.
The two shipwreck hunters found the ship lying partially on its side, with it's masts still rising 70 feet above the lake bottom.
"Usually when ships go down in big storms, they get beat up quite a bit. They don't sink nice and square," Scoville said.
(The Ontario) went down in a huge storm and it still managed to stay in tact," he said. "There are even two windows that aren't broken. Just going down, the pressure difference can break the windows. It's a beautiful ship."
Kennard and Scoville confirmed their discovery when they spotted the ship's distinctive two crows' nests on each mast, decorative scroll work on the bow stem and quarter galleries on either side of the stern.
They also videoed two cannons, to anchors and the ship's bell.
(Taken from wire service reports)