Subject: RE: 10/11/75 -- Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald
From:
GUEST
Date: 10 Nov 04 - 01:56 PM
Well, you can go visit some Lake Superior shipwrecks up close and personally, if you want. There are both glass bottom boat tours and scuba diving tours. For those who don't know, the ship sank in the Lake Superior "Graveyard of Ships" (freshwater area reminiscent of the Outer Banks of North Carolina), just off the coast near the Whitefish Point Lighthouse in Michigan's UP.
There have been several expeditions to the Edmund Fitzgerald site involving National Geographic Society, and the brass bell was brought up from the ship on one of them, at the request of the family members of the crew.
You can also tour a ship in drydock that is very much like the Edmund Fitzgerald at Duluth Harbor, in Duluth MN. Unbelievable the size of these ships. The Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, which is the Wisconsin twin port to Duluth.
Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum has the story, and some photographs of the expeditions, and is now home to the brass bell, if you'd like to visit it.
There is also this documentary film about it, though I've never seen it. The website says the film includes excellent underwater footage of the wreck.
However, any suggestion of this being the worst shipwreck ever in the Great Lakes is pure folk hype. The November storms on Lake Superior, however, are not, and neither are the massive low pressure systems over the Great Plains that occur in November too. The most recent storm that came out of the Great Plains and Lakes became "The Perfect Storm" in the Atlantic--that movie with George Clooney, ya know?
I've lived though two such storms now, one on land, one on the shores of Lake Superior.
The worst maritime disaster in the Great Lakes was the "White Hurricane" or the "Big Blow" of 1913, when three massive low pressure systems converged over Minnesota that year, and blew their way out over Ontario, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, into Lake Erie and New York.
Beginning around noon on November 9th, the storm lasted two full days, and is the worst Great Lakes storm on record. By the time it was all over, 235 men were lost from 20 ships and boats: 178 dead on Lake Huron, the rest on Lake Michigan.
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sj
