I still can't believe a ship of this magnitude went down in a lake.
When the winter storms get going, Superior can be every bit as bad as the North Atlantic.
The Great Lakes have a penchant for getting churned up pretty well with the right wind. They’re not the ocean, of course, but they have plenty of surface area whereby if the wind is right, they can get well beyond choppy.
I remember heading out of Rocky River, just west of Cleveland, on a 21 foot boat, to do some fishing with my friend. We barely made it a mile out, couldn’t see land between the waves, turned around and went back to port. And that was a fairly mild lake - just huge swells. Storms are something else.
That is a good version.
I live two blocks from Lake Michigan and take my walks along it. When the Great Lakes are rough, they are deadly places to be, especially under gale conditions. There are various theories why the Fitzgerald sank. One was that deck hatches were left unlatched, which is alluded to in the song, but was later proven not true. Others are that it got caught between two enormous waves or there were structural defects that made it less seaworthy under extreme conditions. I believe ships of the same kind built by the same shipyard were found to have those defects.
A career Coast Guardsman involved in the search for the Fitz said that the weather during that storm was the worst he had experienced in his life, and he had spent most of his sea time in the North Atlantic.
It wasn’t any ordinary lake. It was Superior.