I grew up in the midwest, and I have always found this Great Lakes shipwreck interesting. It sure wouldn't have been a good feeling to be one of her crew that night. Here is a good documentary about it.
And the song by Gordon Lightfoot to go along with it.

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USAF AMMO

I've always had a fascination for this ship, too, as well as the Carl D. Bradley and the Daniel J. Morrel (the sole survivor of which washed ashore at my hometown). I wish they could dive on the Fitzgerald. With new technology maybe they could have a better understanding of what happened. In any event, I'm curious what the condition of the wreck is since it's been 21 years since the last dive. I've listened to the audio from that night, and I wouldn't have wanted to be on the Anderson or Ford going back out into that.

One of the best trips my son and I have ever made was to the shipwreck museum at Whitefish Point, MI. They have the ship's bell and numerous other artifacts. Absolutely beautiful part of the country too.

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No school like the old school.

I worked at American Ship Building in Tol Oh as a marine electrician. I worked several ships that came in for rework from flat tops to self unloaders. Boy that's the only job I really miss. The ship yard closed in the earl 80's. Been to Whitefish point myself love that part of Michigan.

If you have not seen this you may like it.

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Mike, AmVets Member, Navy Vet

I remember when it made the news. A friend of mine on a Western forum--is a cousin to one of the men lost.

I have been to several nautical museums, including that one, on the Great Lakes. Fascinating all!

Being a kid trapped in a man's body and knowing little about them, I love ships, planes, tanks and trains....(ok, trucks, tractors, bulldozers, cranes, riding mowers...)

Good thread. Thanks.

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Music/Sports/Beer fan

My shooting friend was in the Coast Guard in the 60s & broke ice for the Edmund Fitzgerald. He is 76 now.

Forgot to mention, Gordon Lightfoot sang a song dedicated to that ship and crew.

If that's the documentary I saw a few years ago, it's very well done and offers a plausible explanation of the sinking.

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Oh well, what the hell.

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A Country Boy Can Survive

I was there back in the early 90's. I want to say the year or two before they brought the bell up. I was probably around 12, so I barely remember it. I have always wanted to go back, but have never done it. I love that part of the state.

I was also on the museum ship Valley Camp up at Sault St. Marie. The torn lifeboats from the Fitzgerald are there. I remember that distinctly. It really is a sight to see.

From what I've read, Superior regularly experiences fierce storms beginning in November. If that is the case, it seems to me that it would have been reasonable to stop shipping near the end of October and make such tragedies less likely. But what do I know about such matters?

There were several crew members who lived just up the road from me, including Captain McSorley. I can't imagine what the families went through. Many lose loved ones in tragic circumstances, but not being able to recover the body must multiply the pain.

Andy

Absolutely my favorite song by Gordon. Didn't know for a long time it was based on a true event.

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I Cor. 10:13 "1611KJV"

As a Great Lakes SCUBA diver I would love to dive the Fitz, but I get why there is no diving on her. For one, she lays in about 530'...which is pushing the best of technical diving skills. (for those that are not familiar, open water divers are certified to 60'...advanced open water divers can dive to "recreational limits" which is in the range of about 130'). Since the sinking there are only 2 known people who have dove and touched the wreck. The only options would be a submersible or an ROV. The problem there is that there is a long standing act not allowing surveying of the wreck.

There are an amazing and surprising number of ships sunk in the Great Lakes. Several hundred are recorded. Some of the video taken of water over the bows scares me to death, and I'm not afraid of anything.

They make fierce money sailing as late as they can into the season too. Until the ice-up.

We were one of the last cars to cross the Big Mac bridge that night the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on our way back from the POR rally.

Tom

The Whitefish Point museum was memorable for me too. The Fresnel lens on display is a wonder of Physics optics..........beautiful.
Did you see the gun and coiled line they used to shoot from shore or another boat to rescue sailors?

Campsites along Superior are wonderful. One morning we were collecting rocks along the shore, being watched by Sam, our English Setter. He proceeded to go in shoulder high, stick his head underwater, and bring back a rock! (he was good at bringing back pheasants too!)
Dave

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I watched a documentary about the wreck the other night at work. Their theory was that because EFG's navigation radars were out they got off course and into shallow water where they bottomed out and holed the hull.

The theory was that they were taking on more water than they realized and got hit by a rogue wave and they ship didn't have the buoyancy to come out the other side and just kept going straight down.

Supposedly this happened so fast that by the time they realized anything was wrong they had already sunk. This accounted for the fact that EFG vanished from the Anderson's radar instantly without ever sending a distress call.

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Retired Career Security Guard

Here are the official reports on the EFG sinking:
GLMS 24 - Marine Board of Investigation: Sinking of the EDMUND FITZGERALD . Center for Archival Collections . Finding Aids . BGSU Libraries

SS Edmund Fitzgerald - Wikipedia

A link to the Official USCG report on the EFG. Scroll down to Major Marine Casualty Investigative Reports, Documents & Other Official Information: look for 1975. This is a PDF file and will download when you click on the link. Coast Guard: Marine Safety History Index

Good thing you didn't join the Coast Guard. Water over the bow is nothing compared to water over the flying bridge 80 feet above the surface. Been there, done that.

My dad has a house up on the east side of Superior, about 60 miles N. of the Soo (so 30 or so N. of where the ship went down). That lake is ferocious, is all I can say.

Lake FX | Sault Star

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How God has blessed us!

Wife walking the beach in front of the museum this summer. Lots of things you think about at that beautiful place.


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Pass it on.
Mark

Yes, sir; I guess $$$ trump everything.

Are they still mining iron ore in northern MN??

Andy

Dave--I would expect to be banned from the S&W Forum if I did not get a picture of the Manby Mortar!

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No school like the old school.

Dave as you pointed out, simply amazing.

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No school like the old school.

I liked the Lyle Gun too.

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No school like the old school.

From a National Geographic story:

The Edmund Fitzgerald left the port of Superior, Wisconsin, the day before the tragedy. It was carrying 26,116 long tons of iron ore to be processed in Detroit, Michigan. Increasingly stormy weather forced the ship to seek refuge in Whitefish Bay, between the twin cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada.
 
The weather on Lake Superior quickly turned violent as the ship reached the bay. The Edmund Fitzgerald faced winds gusting up to 50 knots (58 miles per hour), and waves cresting as high as 5 meters (16 feet). It probably hit a sandbar and suffered damage to its lower hull. The ship also encountered “three sisters,” a series of rogue waves reaching as high as 10 meters (35 feet).The ship lost radar, began listing to one side, and reported taking on increasing amounts of water before losing contact with a nearby ship.
 
The tragedy of the Edmund Fitzgerald resulted in major changes to safety regulations for ships traveling on the Great Lakes. Cargo ships are now required to use depth finders, survival suits are part of every ship’s mandatory safety kit, and the shipping network now has sophisticated GPS technology to better track ships and their crews.

well, I was going to guess that the lens was a fourth order but I looked it up and it's a third order lens. They came in various sizes. I had a sixth order lens sitting in my office at Coast Guard Base San Francisco (Yerba Buena Island for those familiar with the area). They are a thing of beauty and today, worth a small fortune. For many years it was not possible to replace broken prisms, but now they can be gotten, made of a clear acrylic that you cannot distinguish from the original leaded glass. You ain't seen anything until you've seen a first order. It's about 8 feet tall. I'll dig up a photo of one in my archives.

That Lyle gun is interesting too. It was used to shoot lines out to a ship in the surf and worked very well. While I was at USCG Base SF we made models of them to give to dignitaries. I have one buried away in my memorabilia.

When I was in Officer Candidate School there was a Lyle Gun on the grass in front of the building and we had to polish it every morning. The class before us got fed up with that and stole it, and put it in the trunk of the Security Officer's car. He led a big investigation to find it and was embarrassed by the gate security when he tried to leave the base. They made him open the trunk. Voila! He had fun explaining that to the CO.

No idea about iron mines in MN. I don't think they're mining much metal in MI though. Went on a few copper and iron mine tours up there. It's interesting to see the old towns like Calumet where they used to have a population of around 80k a hundred years ago and very few now, but the infrastructure of buildings is still there for a much larger town. Like Shutte's bar, with it's own little stage and dance hall, concert halls, banks, civil buildings, etc.

Thanks for the recommendation. I hadn't seen that documentary before and appreciate the fact that he showed quite a bit of footage of the actual crew and officers. I pictured McSorley to look like the Titanic captain with a neatly trimmed beard.

Minntac a mine owned by US Steel is up at Iron Mountain, Minn ..

it was idled this past summer due to low steel prices in the US and world ..

A set of "THREE SISTER" waves was also reported to have hit the Edmund Fitzgerald just before contact was lost ..

Captain Jesse B. "Bernie" Cooper of the Arthur M. Anderson, the laker closest to the Fitzgerald at the time it sank, reported that his ship was hit by massive waves not long before he lost contact with the Fitzgerald that went down with all 29 crew members.
In the book "Shipwrecks of Lake Superior," Cooper said of the unusually large waves that "we took two of the largest seas of the trip. The first one flooded our boat deck. It had enough force to come down on the starboard lifeboat, pushing it into the saddles with a force strong enough to damage the bottom of the lifeboat. ... The second large sea put green water (the powerful center of a wave) on our bridge deck! This is 35 feet above the waterline."

The ship was structurally faulty due to an extension added on that gave too much of a twisting moment. It could have been filled a taconite AND water and maybe nose dived and hit the bottom. Having a big ship like that disappear in an instant is mysterious even after finding several causes for it. The lakes have thousands of wrecks on their bottoms.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

Many of the Big Fitz crew were from Northwest Ohio. Every November a memorial is held. It's low-key, but nobody here will forget McSorley and the Edmund Fitzgerald.

My Father-in-law was a wheelsman on the Great Lakes for over 40 years and would talk often about the Edmund Fitzgerald and the storms that would arise later in the season. As someone posted earlier the longer they could go into the season the better the money.

I'd have to carry my own survival suit, flotation and raft to get that hazardous duty pay. In a case though, where the ship would nose dive with everybody tight inside and stay down, nobody would get out anyway. In that case I think I would carry a gun to end it quicker.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

I had always believed that the primary clue to the sinking was the downed fence rail. That would be indicative of either: 1. Some structural failure; or 2. Some extremely heavy debris washing over the deck in the tremendous seas. That led me to believe the ship bottomed somewhere near the Six-Fathom Shoal, suffered a structural failure and begun taking on immense amounts of water until it ultimately sank. But subsequent dives showed no evidence of this in the wreckage or around the shoal, so as usual I was wrong.

The shipped also may have "hogged" between two waves, but that would likely have caused an immediate sinking.

Of course the Coast Guard's report thought it was unsecured/inadequate hatch covers/clamps. I always thought that was wrong.

But on our trip we spent two days at the Soo Locks watching the Laker's lock through. The picture attached was typical--not a single hatch was secured by more than a few clamps because it is such a god-awful, time consuming job to secure all those clamps!

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No school like the old school.

Yup, lots of wrecks all over the Great Lakes. I grew up in Avon Lake, OH and there's a tugboat, the Alva B, off shore in 15' of water and you can stand on the boiler (do it at least once a summer). Alva B

Always knew of the EF growing up and knew the song in my youth. A couple of years ago the wife and I took the Goldwing around Lake Superior and while in Sault St. Marie I decided to watch the ships go through the locks for a bit. Low and behold what came through but the Alfred Anderson! I couldn't believe that I was there at the time that particular ship would come through...I was not even sure it was still sailing! I was telling my wife about it's connection to the Fitzgerald when all of the sudden it was announced over the PA that the Anderson was coming through they told a brief story. Nice that the Fitzgerald is still remembered and referred to all these years later. I think it has come to represent all the ships that Superior has taken.

The first 6 minutes are wasted time, the last three is a pretty accurate depiction of what the documentary I saw says happened

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Retired Career Security Guard

I tend to believe the theory of the captain of the Anderson as far as what probably sank the Big Fitz. Incidentally, for you Lake Boat Nerds...... you can see where all the boats are on the lake with the interactive map at Great Lakes and Seaway Shipping - BoatNerd.Com

Here's the link right to the map. Great Lakes & Seaway Shipping Online AIS Passage Maps

Here's the Anderson now, in Two Harbors, MN MarineTraffic: Global Ship Tracking Intelligence | AIS Marine Traffic

Nice! I looked up the Edgar B. Speer, Edgar B. Speer It was the last boat built at the AmShip yard in Lorain, OH and I got to go on a tour of it when it was finished. A family friend was an electrician at that yard and got us some friends and family passes.

Remember the times. the US was still an industrial powerhouse in heavy industry. The steel mills were hungry for ore to feed industries all over the country, construction, cars, appliances, etc. If there was no steel, thousands of jobs would be lost and our economy would grind to a halt.

It was already mentioned that pay was boosted late in the season. Some people have to do the dangerous work. Miners, loggers, fishing and nowadays, police work.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

Kinda related. In the early 70s, I remember a US Coast Guard recruiting commercial that often played. It showed a smallish boat of some kind in very bad weather almost rolling over in the heavy bad weather-but the crew took it in stride like nothing was happening. Anyway-remembering that--makes me tip my hat even more to you seafaring types.

On the show about the fishermen off the Alaskan coast, they were often called because of terrible weather and hellish conditions for a rescue.

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"He was kinda funny lookin'"

This is a real good first hand account it was like on the lake that night.

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USAF AMMO

Those big Great Lakes steamers kindled my desire to sail on ships before the Edmund Fitzgerald was built. Healed over 52 degrees once off of Cape Hatteras, but we made it thru. No fun. God bless all those who didn't make it, and there are many.

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Foster Positivity.

I never watched the show-but remember being saddened by one of the captains on that sshow-being killed-or just passing away somehow.

Oh thanks a lot for posting about the Edmund Fitzgerald!

Now I've got that awful Gordon Lightfoot song stuck in my head!


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