The Denis Sullivan, then and now

In the summer of 2012 the Schooner Coast had a schooner. The Denis Sullivan started that season's voyage at the Wisconsin Maritime Museum's River Rendezvous in Manitowoc, anchored off Kewaunee on a July evening, took families on two- and three-day sails between Sturgeon Bay, Manitowoc and Milwaukee, and lay alongside the Door County Maritime Museum for its Classic and Wooden Boat Festival. The restored pages in this archive still list those dates. The ship is still sailing, but not here.

A ship built by volunteers

The idea came from a group of Milwaukee residents and out-of-state volunteers in 1989. They called themselves Milwaukee Lake Schooner Ltd. and wanted a tall ship that would serve as a floating classroom about the Great Lakes. The naval architect Tim Graul of Sturgeon Bay drew her lines, and Peterson Builders laid the keel. Then the public took over. Close to a thousand people gave nearly a million volunteer hours to building her, and the Menominee Nation donated six large white pines for her masts.

She was launched, not quite finished, in June 2000, and named after the grandfather of a major backer, Jere Sullivan. The first Denis Sullivan had been the longest-serving captain on the Great Lakes, aboard the Milwaukee-built schooner Moonlight. That November the new ship left Milwaukee for her first Caribbean voyage under Captain Mark Crutcher. The organization behind her renamed itself the Wisconsin Lake Schooner Education Association and later merged with Pier Wisconsin to form Discovery World, the Milwaukee museum that owned and operated her for the next two decades.

Pete Seeger recorded a song about her in 2001. Milwaukee folk singer David HB Drake served as her shantyman, leading the work songs that set the rhythm for hauling lines, from the start until she left the city.

How close is she to a real Great Lakes schooner?

She is not a copy of any one vessel. Her designers studied several nineteenth-century Great Lakes cargo schooners, among them the Rouse Simmons, the Clipper City and the Alvin Clark, and above the waterline she looks the part: the hull shape of an efficient cargo carrier, an authentic deck layout and rig, and a raffee, the triangular square-rigged topsail that many lake schooners flew on the foremast.

Below the waterline she breaks with tradition on purpose. The old lake schooners had nearly flat bottoms and a centerboard, so they could get into shallow harbors like Algoma and Kewaunee, which is exactly the feature the original Schooner Coast site praised. To meet modern Coast Guard rules for passenger vessels, the Denis Sullivan has a deeper hull and a weighted keel, which make her more stable and give six feet of headroom below decks, and her old-style open cargo hold is divided by watertight bulkheads.

• Length: 137 ft overall, 98 ft on deck
• Beam: 24 ft; draft 8.75 ft
• Mast height: 95 ft
• Displacement: 150 tons
• Sails: ten, about 4,600 sq ft, gaff rig
• Engines: two 180 hp auxiliaries
• Capacity: 31 overnight, 60 on day sails, crew included
• Crew: 10

What a Schooner Coast sail looked like in 2012

The restored 2012 page gives a good picture of how the ship was used on this coast. Passengers could take a deck tour at the dock, book a few hours' cruise on the lake, or sign up for two- and three-day family sails between ports, sleeping aboard. One leg, Sturgeon Bay to Milwaukee in early August, was for young people only, and they sailed as part of the crew for three days and two nights. The idea, then as at World Ocean School now, was that you learn the lake by working the ship: hauling on lines to raise the big gaff sails, standing watch, steering, and living in the close quarters a nineteenth-century schooner crew knew.

The music was part of it. David HB Drake's 2004 album A Schooner Songbag collected traditional and original songs sung by people connected with the ship; Pete Seeger's "The Schooner Denis Sullivan" is on it. If you sailed on her in those years, that is probably the soundtrack you remember.

The sale

For years the ship was the flagship of the State of Wisconsin and of the United Nations Environment Programme. Then the pandemic hit. In March 2020 Discovery World furloughed her last two permanent crew, and without a licensed captain she stayed tied up in Milwaukee through the following seasons. Amphitrite Digital, owner of Chicago's tall ship Windy, offered to buy her and keep her in Milwaukee, but Discovery World did not want her to go to a for-profit operator.

In September 2022 Discovery World announced it had sold the Denis Sullivan, for an undisclosed sum, to World Ocean School, a nonprofit sail-training school based in Boston. The news surprised the Friends of the Denis Sullivan, who had not been told in advance and had no chance to look for another buyer. Many in Milwaukee objected that the Great Lakes had few tall ships while the East Coast had plenty.

On October 8, 2022, the ship left Milwaukee under motor, escorted by a flotilla of local boats. After repairs in St. Petersburg, Florida, she reached St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands in mid-December. Her home port is still listed as Milwaukee, partly as a courtesy and partly because World Ocean School has said it wants to keep her tie to the city.

Where she sails now

World Ocean School runs her on a seasonal circuit. In winter she is based in Christiansted Harbor on St. Croix, where she hosts school groups from the island, including multi-day programs on ship handling, raising sail, water quality, buoyancy, sea poetry and maritime history, and offers public sunset sails to support those programs. In spring she heads back north toward Boston, where the school runs its summer sailing programs, including multi-day trips for middle and high school students. Her sister ship at World Ocean School is the schooner Roseway.

As of early 2026 the school's own updates showed her busy on St. Croix, with weeklong day programs for island schools and appearances at community events. If you want to sail on her, that is where to look; she is not expected back on Lake Michigan.

What is left on the Schooner Coast

The quick answer is: the wrecks of the ships she was modeled on. The Rouse Simmons lies off Point Beach, the Daniel Lyons off Algoma, the scow schooner Alaska off Two Rivers. The Wisconsin Maritime Museum's full-size cross-section of the Clipper City in Manitowoc is the best way to understand what life aboard a working lake schooner was like, and the Door County Maritime Museum in Sturgeon Bay, where she lay alongside for the 2012 Classic and Wooden Boat Festival, keeps the tugs, models and stories of the lake trade.

Sources: Wikipedia article "Denis Sullivan (schooner)"; World Ocean School program updates and St. Croix news coverage, 2025 to 2026; original Schooner Coast pages on the 2012 voyage (read November 2026).