The research vessel R/V Amazon had just left its dock on Malletts Bay in Colchester on a sweltering July morning when the captain, Gary Lefebvre, recognized a familiar object on sonar in 30 feet of water. Several hundred yards offshore were the scattered remains of a 1930 Ford Model A Roadster that plunged through the ice in December 1936, drowning its two passengers.
Guided by multiple sonar units and a digital chart of Lake Champlain, Lefebvre, 68, maneuvered the 27-foot pontoon boat over the wreckage, then lowered a trolling motor, which uses GPS to keep the vessel in place. Moments later, Ellen Lefebvre, Gary’s wife and first mate, dropped a remotely operated vehicle into the water.
As Gary piloted the ROV to the debris field with a handheld controller, a lime-green video image of an old radiator appeared on computer screens in the cabin. Partially coated with zebra mussels, it sat near the car’s battery, wheels and rear axle.
“This thing was in beautiful shape when we found it,” Gary lamented. But just weeks after the Lefebvres located the car, in 2012, a sailboat seeking safe harbor during a storm snagged it with its anchor and tore it apart.
Of the more than 5,000 underwater objects that the Lefebvres have discovered and documented in the past 14 years, the Roadster is neither the oldest nor the most impressive, but Gary has an understandable attachment to it. It’s among the first wrecks he ever found in Lake Champlain using the advanced scanning technology aboard this private research vessel. And, as he learned later, one of the two people who died when the car went through the ice was James Sullivan of Winooski, Gary’s great-uncle.
Though theirs is a hobby built on tragedies of the past, the Lefebvres have turned their nautical pastime into a free community resource of sorts. Over the years they’ve helped the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes locate, identify and monitor some of the lake’s roughly 300 known shipwrecks. They’ve assisted the U.S. Coast Guard and search-and-rescue teams in finding the bodies of drowning victims. And, using their high-resolution underwater cameras, they’ve captured digital videos and photos of underwater objects that are inaccessible to even deepwater technical divers.
The Lefebvres use a process called photogrammetry, which involves shooting thousands of photos of the same object from different vantage points. They then load those images into a computer, which stitches them together to create detailed, three-dimensional renderings that are invaluable to archaeologists, historians and even members of the public.
Because the Lefebvres post their images on social media almost daily — Gary also uses newspapers.com to explore the history of each wreck — they receive occasional messages from people who have personal connections to those disasters. Ellen said she was on the bow of their boat one day, eating lunch near Schuyler Island, when a diver emerged from the water and asked, “Are you Ellen?” He had recognized her and the vessel from their videos.
While the Lefebvres use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, most of their work gets no compensation beyond the thrill of making new discoveries. As Gary put it, “There’s a story behind every one of them.”
The two lifelong Vermonters live on Malletts Bay, next door to the house where Gary grew up. He sports the bushy white beard and squinty gaze of a seasoned mariner. Ellen, 65, has sun-bleached hair and the slim, tanned physique of someone who regularly stands on the deck, hauling lines and pulling ROVs out of the water.
When Gary was a kid, he worked for Earl Kelly, who owned the now-defunct Kelly’s Boat House in Colchester. One day, Kelly told him about an underwater spot on Malletts Bay littered with anchors, bottles and other decades-old debris. Gary and his friends took some discarded docks and old inner tubes, paddled out to the spot, and started scavenging. Gary got good enough to dive 20 feet down and hold his breath for up to two minutes. He and his friends would come home with bloodshot eyes but plenty of cool antiques, and he was hooked.
Gary got his scuba certification in 1978 and spent decades as a technical diver, reaching depths of 170 feet before retiring from the sport two years ago. For 40 years he made industrial machinery at Hazelett Strip-Casting, about a mile from his house, and dabbled in real estate development, auto refurbishing and professional off-road racing.
In 2012, Gary talked to a diver friend who was searching for the wreck of a bootleggers’ boat that had sunk in Malletts Bay in the 1920s. During Prohibition, liquor smugglers from Canada often used the bay because its accessible sandy beaches made it easy to transport the illegal goods. The smugglers were rumored to have either scuttled their boat or gotten into a shoot-out with federal agents during which their vessel caught fire and sank.
Gary had an idea where the elusive boat might be. So he drove to Brattleboro, bought a used pontoon boat, installed side-scan sonar and began surveying the bay — where he eventually found it. Though the boat didn’t contain any of the liquor bottles he’d hoped for, Gary recovered a piece of bronze hardware that, as he determined from an old marine catalog, was a nautical rail cap discontinued in 1921.
The rail cap “just started the ball rolling,” Gary said. Soon thereafter, he and Ellen found the Roadster, whose age he determined from one of its headlights. The Lefebvres have since discovered or photographed other sunken cars of similar vintage, including a 1926 Model T in remarkably good condition in 170 feet of water off Split Rock Point in Essex, N.Y.
Continue reading after the photo gallery…
The Lefebvres kept scanning Malletts Bay, identifying more than two dozen wrecks and other unknown objects, which Gary would flag on his digital chart and return to later. They eventually expanded their searches to Shelburne Bay, the waters off Valcour Island and the broad lake, taking different routes each time.
Some of the couple’s historically important discoveries hadn’t shown up in the Whole Lake Survey, a 10-year joint project of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum and Middlebury College. The survey started in 1996 with the goal of mapping the entire lake bottom and identifying and cataloging shipwrecks and other cultural artifacts that were at risk of destruction by zebra mussels and human plunderers. By its completion in 2006, it had documented more than 80 previously unknown wrecks, the most significant being the Spitfire, one of Benedict Arnold’s gunboats from the Revolutionary War.
But the Lefebvres knew from their own scans that the Whole Lake Survey didn’t find everything that lies beneath. In August 2020, they located the paddle wheels from the Phoenix, a 146-foot steamboat that caught fire and foundered on September 4, 1819 — one of the earliest and most significant steamboat wrecks in U.S. history.
The Lefebvres were also involved in the first-ever deepwater dive to the Sarah Ellen, a 73-foot, two-masted commercial schooner that sank in a winter gale on December 19, 1860, claiming two lives. After the Lefebvres created a 3D rendering of the Sarah Ellen and posted it online, they were contacted by a descendant of Joseph LaPlante, the sole survivor of that disaster. As it turned out, Gary had attended school with her.
The Lefebvres don’t just work on Lake Champlain. In 2023, Art Cohn, director emeritus of the maritime museum, asked for their help on a research project he was overseeing on New York’s Seneca Lake. Using various forms of sonar, Cohn had discovered at least 44 previously unknown shipwrecks from the early to mid-19th century. Those wrecks sat in more than 600 feet of water, making them inaccessible to divers.
The sonar images offered Cohn little information about the vessels, so he hired the Lefebvres to bring their boat and ROVs to Seneca Lake to photograph them, then use photogrammetry to create 3D models of each one. Their renderings were so vivid and informative that they were used on posters to promote the Erie Canal bicentennial in 2025.
Gary piloted the ROV into the sunken vessel, its headlights illuminatingprehistoric-looking fish sleeping inside.
“It may have been the most productive I’ve been on a project — ever,” Cohn said. As for the Lefebvres’ contribution, “It’s priceless from an archaeological point of view.”
Not all the Lefebvres’ finds are centuries old. The day a reporter joined them on their boat, the broad lake was too choppy to visit the Phoenix’s paddle wheels. “Lady Lake Champlain is in need of some serious anger management,” Gary said, swinging the boat around and returning to Malletts Bay.
Instead, he brought us to a more recent wreck: a 22-foot cabin cruiser that went down in September 1975 and now sits in 73 feet of water. Gary stopped above the wreck and turned on the trolling motor while Ellen lowered a cluster of 5,000-lumen underwater lights and an ROV.
Gary piloted the ROV into the sunken vessel, its headlights illuminating more than a dozen large, prehistoric-looking fish sleeping inside. Known as burbot, they’re nocturnal, rarely seen near the surface and thus difficult to catch. Though anglers frequently ask him for the location of this wreck in hopes of snagging one of those prizes, Gary stays mum. As with nearly all the wrecks they’ve surveyed, historic or otherwise, the Lefebvres keep certain details on the down-low.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Deep Pursuits: Gary and Ellen Lefebvre have turned their quest for Lake Champlain shipwrecks into a community service and art form”
This article appears in July 22 • 2026.
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