Three shipwreck explorers from Rochester have chronicled and filmed decades of deep-water discoveries in Lake Ontario, now they're sharing their best journeys in a new book. 

It's called "Shipwrecks of Lake Ontario: A Journey of Discovery."

There are estimated 200 sunken ships in Lake Ontario and some 6,000 in the Great Lakes. Jim Kennard and teammates Roger Pawlowski and Chip Stevens have discovered about two dozen ships in our backyard.

Kennard has been looking for sunken ships for decades. 

"I started diving after I took a course at the YMCA in Rochester," he said. "One thing leads to another— you dive and go on a shipwreck and this is great but I'd like to go on one that nobody else found before and that is how everything started back in the early 70s for me."

Stevens, a retired architect, illustrated the book.

“When I do the sketches of the wrecks, I need to look at the DVDs and do lots of sketches and put them all together and then I do watercolor paintings of the wrecks," Stevens said. "When we put the ROV [remote operated vehicle] down, it doesn’t see the whole wreck. We only see 15 or 20 feet of it because it is so dark down there."

Pawlowski is in charge of the gear for the crew. He records the underwater imagery.

"My part of the team is providing a boat and the ROV. The ROV is fairly straightforward, it is a $45,000 device and it has a camera in the back and in the front, a sonar to look at things and on the bottom there is a little grabber that we can grab stuff with," he said. 

If you want to meet the shipwreck explorer team in person, you can register now for the book premiere. It takes place Wednesday, June 19 at the Rochester Yacht Club.

All proceeds from book sales benefit the National Museum of the Great Lakes and its underwater archaeology program.