As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most.
Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the mintues to hours?
I remember the day she went down.
Damn, now I’ve got that tune back in my head, and I didn’t even play it.
There was a hour or maybe two hour show on one of the History type channels about the Edmond Fitzgerald.
I can’t recall much about it but I do remember there was a ship following it, knowing it was in trouble, then just suddenly, it was gone.
Grew up on the shores of the Great Lakes.
Since I was a very little kidlet, I knew that the Edmund Fitzgerald was sad news.
The captain of the Arthur Anderson at that point had been working Great Lake shipping for a half-century; he said that was the worst storm he had ever seen.
The father of the wife of a guy I work with was an engineer who was originally supposed to be in the Fitzgerald on that last trip. Fortunately for him, plans changed and he didn’t go.
729 ft long and sank in only 530 ft of water. The bow maybe smashed into the lake floor then she broke up.
Why is the wheelhouse on great lake freighters forward and to the rear on salt water ships?
The gales of November comes early...great song....Dad has the song..
Bookmark
Other famous Lake Superior ship tragedies:
Shipwrecks of Lake Superior: 7 Famous Ships Lost in the Waters of the Lake
https://www.lakepedia.com/blog/lake-superior-shipwrecks.html
Spent a workday on one of those oar boats when it was unloading taconite at a steel mill in Chicago - best day of work I had all that summer (the overhead cranes and a bulldozer they lowered into the holds did most of the work; we human laborers just had to shovel up the leftovers in nooks and crannies when they got near the end). Most of my work day was lounging on the deck, watching pleasure boats move up and down the Calumet River.
I remember that storm. I was driving from Toronto toward the Beaver Valley and I could hardly keep the car on the road. It was a little Volkswagen bug. I heard all the churches around the lakeshore tolled their bells 29 times. People just sat around TV or the radio when the news came in and said Oh My God over and over.
(wonder if the Fitz might have been one of them)
Remember that night very well.
It was a German torpedo from a rogue U-boat.
I lived in Green Bay and knew schoolmates whose fathers were crewmen on Great Lakes freighters. We were told that the worst storms and highest waves occurred on Lake Superior because it was the largest lake and on the map it looked like an angry wolf.
Amazed to learn how few lives were lost there.