Nigh on thirty years ago there were several outfits pulling long-sunken logs from the bottom of Lake Superior (and probably bayous and lakes elsewhere), selling the tight-grained old growth lumber at a premium to folks like luthiers and custom woodworkers.
The companies that I knew about then no longer appear to be in business in 2025. Perhaps the market got saturated! Ba-dum tish.
I have heard that environmental considerations came up in other areas centering on the ripping out of long-established habitat for fish, etc.
Is this sort of thing still a viable business model? Are there still companies that do this regularly, as opposed to two dudes in a boat that wildcat a log when the price of Doug Fir goes over $10 a board foot?
You mean that wood that has been underwater for decades or even centuries is still good? It must take some heavy baking to get it dry enough to use. Or are there actually applications where sunken wood is preferred? Like making lutes? Not a huge market in the post-minstrel age, but not nothing I guess.
Those logs were from old-growth trees, which grew slowly, and thus, had very dense grain, making the wood from them very different – and, it seems, higher quality – from what we get now, from modern, fast-growing farmed trees. In addition, the cold temperatures and low oxygen content at the bottom of Lake Superior helped to preserve the logs. This article (from 1998) indicates that the wood was being used for furniture, woodcrafting, and, yes, musical instruments.
To the OP’s point, they may now be out of business; their web page domain, listed in their YouTube profile, is up for sale. The last post they made on YouTube was three years ago.
As far as metal is concerned, there is (or at least was, for a while) a market for “low-background steel”: Steel that was made before 1945 and hence has low levels of background radiation, which increased as a result of atmospheric nuclear detonations. Such steel is useful for Geiger counters and particle detectors, and would often be sourced from scrapped ships. I doubt there’d be an analogous market for pre-modern wood, though.
There’s a company in Ottawa that does this, pulling logs off the bottom of the Ottawa River. It’s not clear how much of their current business is these logs, but it’s at least some.
I was reading an article that the end of above ground nuclear testing was long enough ago that atmospheric radiation levels are basically back to normal and there’s not much call for low-background steel anymore.
That’s the big thing with teak- it’s pretty rot-resistant in marine applications due to a very tight grain, high strength, and abundance of natural oils.
It’s a good rot resistant wood, but marine applications technically means in salt water where wood does not rot. Less dense woods may fall apart in salt water though. Teak is still used frequently in freshwater boats because it will last longer than most wood. There is no shortage of wood found at the bottom of the sea, from shipwrecks, fallen docks, or even old trees. Wood doesn’t last as long in fresh water.
Not exactly underwater, but here’s a guy working on a bit of 2200 year old bald cypress. In it it mentions a reality show that was on the History Channel called AxMex where they extract these bits of cypress from swamps. Explanation of it starts at around 3:30.
I was going to say, of course this was a business model with an expiration date. How much timber must have been lost by sinking-- 1%, if that? But surprisingly, according to this article:
On one estimate, between 10 and 30 percent of the logs moved this way sank, both in the rivers during the “drives” and in the lakes as the logs were being towed in “booms” to sawmills. If just 10 percent of the logs moved in these two years sank in transit, this still would mean that some 7 million board feet of logs would have sunk during the trip from Lake Superior to Saginaw Bay.
That’s a lot of timber. Still and all, harvesting any limited resource is bound to have diminishing returns eventually.
When the This Old House folks did a project in Charleston, South Carolina (2018) they had a table (I think?) created from a cypress tree pulled up from a river in the area. NPR profiled a business that did that work in 2013 (Dredging South Carolina's Rivers For Long-Forgotten Timber : NPR) but like a bunch of businesses mentioned here, they appear to have disappeared.
Well, it’s as above. The resource is inherently limited. And there’s some competing pressures. Lakes like Superior would probably contain far more logs than any river will, so the resource would be expected to last longer. But at the same time, Superior is far deeper than most rivers, so retrieving the logs is thus much harder, and thus more expensive.
My semi-educated guess is not that the resource itself is limited; it’s that the specific demand for this material is not enough to make it profitable to salvage the material (boat, manpower), slab it out, dry it out, resaw it to remove twist, checking, etc. from the drying, and transport it a long way to market. I think that the energy costs to dry the wood and the subsequent losses from splitting and warping are the killer.
There are a lot more people who want a truckload of fairly-straight 2x6 lumber to build a house than there are people who want $30,000 conference tables. Even turned into tight-grained veneer, you’re selling the story of the wood more than its physical properties. An individual woodworker might buy a couple dozen board feet and then move on to other exotics.