- [Diver] You can take the open water dive into here, but you can also take the guy who does 300 foot dives on a regular basis, and they're gonna love this wreck because it's a really good one.

- Starts at 55 feet.

You know, you jump in the water, you go down, and there it is, right there.

(water splashes) - [Jitka Hanakova] The Prins Willem is one of the most-dived shipwrecks around Milwaukee for a number of reasons.

It's intact, still.

And also, it's accessible to most people because the wreck starts at about 55 feet.

We are very lucky in the Great Lakes because the water is fresh and cold.

On the bottom it's usually always 40 degrees.

It doesn't change.

So the shipwrecks are preserved, and they don't deteriorate.

They don't fall apart like in the ocean.

- [Rick Richter] These are time capsules.

When you go down there, and you see these wrecks because it's a moment frozen in time when you go to the bottom.

It's the only place you can see them.

There's no museums that have all these old wooden schooners.

And there's schooners that went down in the 1800s that look like the day they went down.

Sometimes suddenly it'll hit you that "Oh my goodness.

All these people died on this wreck."

You're very, you get somber a little bit about it, and you deal with respect.

- [Jitka Hanakova] We have a law in the Great Lakes, you can not take artifacts off of ships.

So a lot of the ships still have artifacts on them.

People from the east coast, west coast, from the ocean, they take things off of ships, so then there's nothing to see.

On these ships you can go and see still some china, you can see the wheel, see bells on some of them, mast standing upright.

- [Boat Scholar] If they could raise them, they tried to raise them because they want to reuse them and sail them again.

Prins Willem, they wanted to raise it.

They tried to raise it, and it would just prove too difficult to do it.

In some cases it's incredibly expensive, and in other cases, sometimes in raising them, you disturb them, and they are filled, in some cases, with a lot of fuel oil.

In some cases it's more of a tomb situation.

Let's keep it entombed and encased.

(regulator breathing)