TheFitzgeraldoften held records for excellent safety and broke records for most tonnage hauled during a single shipping season. Forty-four years ago today on Nov. 10, 1975, 18 kilometres off Coppermine Point, and 60 kilometres north of Sault Ste Marie, Ont., the 222-metre iron ore carrier Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29 aboard, sank. The Anderson turned out to be the primary vessel in the search, taking the lead. The popular misconception is that non of the crewmembers bodies were never discovered. Dave Sproule, a natural heritage education and marketing specialist with Ontarios Department of Environment, Conservation and Parks Land and Water Division in Sudbury, has written Lake Superior is a weathermaker so big it creates its own weather Around 3:00 in the afternoon, both ships had passed Caribou Island, Ontario, home of the notorious Six Fathom Shoal, a sharpy rocky outcropping more than capable of tearing into the hull of a deep draft vessel in stormy weather. The light at Whitefish Point was out temporarily on the night the Fitz went down. It was not long after thatFitzgeraldvanished from theAnderson'sradar. Ten miles ahead, Captain McSorley learned from Captain Cedric Woodard, a U.S. pilot aboard the Swedish-flagged Avafors, that neither the light nor directional radio beacon at Whitefish Point were working. If you purchase a product or register for an account through one of the links on our site, we may receive compensation. It's still not completely agreed upon whether the Fitzgerald broke in half on the surface or underwater. The same problems were reported aboard theHomer. Furthermore, any chance of using the wreck itself as a means of understanding what happened is next to impossible as the Canadian government has banned all diving operations period to the wreck since the recovery of theFitzgerald'sbell in 1993. it is likely that the world may never know the true ending of theEdmund Fitzgerald. The radar signal, or pip of the Fitzgerald kept getting obscured by sea return. USS Indianapolis (CL/CA-35) was a Portland-class heavy cruiser of the United States Navy, named for the Grindstone Island Cars All rights reserved (About Us). Officially, the report of the U.S. Coast Guard marine board of inquiry states that the most probable cause of the sinking was loss of buoyancy due to massive flooding of the cargo hold through ineffective hatch closures. If the ship had "hogged" upon striking the shoal, it could have caused the topside damage reported by Fitzgerald captain Ernest McSorley in the hours before the sinking. The LCA thinks the Fitzgerald grounded on the poorly-marked Six Fathom Shoal northwest of Caribou Island, causing fatal damage to the hull. 301 did sink that fateful night, all hands, but should it have? These tunnel valleys were excavated by subglacial meltwater at the base of the Laurentide Ice Sheet along pre-existing fractures and joints that exist within the bedrock floor of Lake Superior. The shoaling hypothesis suggests that the most probable cause of the Edmund Fitzgerald's wreckage was her shoaling or grounding in the Six Fathom Shoal northwest of Caribou Island when the crew was unable to use the Whitefish Point Light as a navigational aid. However, it resonates. As the afternoon wore on, radio communications with the Fitzgerald concerned navigational information but no extraordinarily alarming reports were offered by Captain McSorley. TheFitzgeraldwould have extra steel plates installed between the hull bottom and her keel which would ensure the keel would no loner move freely from the hull and would stay fastened in place. It was considered a private hunting preserve through the early 1900s. Heavy snow begins to fall and the Fitzgerald is lost from. The bodies have not been recovered. They issued a letter to the National Transportation Safety Board in September, 1977. It is approximately 5.6 kilometres (3.5 mi) long and 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) wide, and 1,600 acres (647 ha . Email him at gellison@mlive.com or follow on Twitter & Instagram. The cause of the sinking is still a matter of much historic debate, both Ley and Sproule note. In a similar vein, Paul Hainault, a retired Michigan Tech University professor, postulated a seiche caused the ship to scrape the bottom of Superior Shoal early that morning and the weakened hull eventually gave out. What if the ship is rebuilt, with more safety features? It happened too fast. Captains challenge high waves with he bow, not the stern. Inspired in large part by reading Gaines and Lowells Newsweek story, Gordon Lightfoot recorded The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the following month in December 1975 at Eastern Sound, a recording studio made out of two Victorian houses at 48 Yorkville Ave. in downtown Toronto. Still remember it after all this time.. Fullerton Islands Restaurant Fullerton. The heavy seas overwhelmed a ship that had already lost freeboard and was listing. Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB) are now standard equipment on lakes vessels, allowing instantaneous identification of the area where a vessel founders. [9][10], This article is about the island in eastern Lake Superior. In that sense, the Fitzgerald met her fate on the path she took to avoid it. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead Sad story. The studio was, yes, indeed, later torn down and replaced by a parking lot. They passed several miles offshore from Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesotas North Shore. A real eye opening view from the man who was the last person to ever speak to theEdmund Fitzgerald's crew. Five years later in 1980, Jacques Cousteaus famous Calypso arrived for the first manned dive inside an underwater vessel to the site. A more serious issue was determined by poor construction and design. Both ships crews could feel the effects.Around 3:00 in the afternoon, both ships had passed Caribou Island, Ontario, home of the notorious Six Fathom Shoal, a sharpy rocky outcropping more than capable of tearing into the hull of a deep draft vessel in stormy weather. An entire generation now has no active memory of November 10, 1975, but the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald continues to fascinate, mystify and preoccupy young and old. But I have to leave the decision up to you., Ill give it a try, but thats all I can do.. Why the Edmund Fitzgerald remains a cultural touchstone, Follow the final journey of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 17 miles to safety: Edmund Fitzgerald by the numbers. Jesse B. Cooper told an audience in Wisconsin the Anderson was struck from astern that evening by a pair of huge waves, which rolled over his ship and continued on toward the Fitzgerald. Cooper tried desperately to raise McSorley on the radio to no avail. Also, a larger, more powerful tug, the Katmai Bay, is now stationed at Sault Ste. Not long after the search ended, years of arguments and disagreements over what could have caused theEdmund Fitzgeraldto sink have clouded up any hope of truly understanding what occurred the night of November 10, 1975 as the shipping companies, government agencies and sea fairers of the Great Lakes all have different theories and opinions that do not match. In the more than 40 years since the ship went down, a cottage industry of shipwreck theorists have tried in vain to solve the sinking of the Fitzgerald, which rests in two pieces in 530 feet of water on the lake bottom 17 miles north of Whitefish Bay. By late autumn, writes Sproule (http://www.ontarioparks.com/parksblog/edmund-fitzgerald-40-years-later/), the Gales of November have usually set in on Superior, creating hazardous conditions for even large modern ships. Cooper believes that from that point on, McSorley knew he was sinking. Caribou Island is part of a large glacial moraine that accumulated south of Michipicoten Island. Cannon, W.F., Green, A.G., Hutchinson, D.R., Lee, M., Milkereit, B., Behrendt, J.C., Halls, H.C., Green, J.C., Dickas, A.B., Morey, G.B. By early the next morning, theAndersonandFitzgeraldencountered a powerful November gale with winds up to 50miles an hour. The last radio communication between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson was at 7:10 pm. The Fitzgerald is about 16 miles ahead. Departing Superior about 2:30 pm, she was soon joined by the Arthur M. Anderson, which had departed Two Harbors, Minnesota under Captain Bernie Cooper. 18335 N. Whitefish Point Road 43 and 1/2 years later the feeling of that morning is still vivid in my mind. Whatever prompted that command just a little over an hour before the sinking, Paquette analyzes that it would have been catastrophic and visible from the pilothouse in the darkness of an early November evening. Since then, there have been about a half dozen dives to the wreck using deep-diving equipment. Conditions only grew worse; at 3:15 p.m., the Captain of the Anderson watched the Fitzgerald round Caribou Island, where it seemed to skirt close to Six Fathom Shoal. He and his officers watched the Fitzgerald pass right over the dangerous area of shallow water. The Headstones originally hailing from Kingston, Ont. With the ship pounding and rolling badly, the crew of the Anderson discovered the Fitzgeralds two lifeboats and other debris but no sign of survivors. The bell of the ship is now on display in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum as a memorial to her lost crew. So why not rebuild the ship? It shouldn't have. The lateral continuity and consistent and parallel direction of the tunnel valleys indicated that they are carved from friable sandstones that underlies the floor of most of eastern Lake Superior. The official Coast Guard board of inquiry came to the conclusion that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank as a result of massive flooding of the cargo hold, saying that this likely resulted from ineffective hatch closure. Noting that many of the hatch clamps photographed on the sunken freighter show little or no damage or distortion, the report states that this could result from improper maintenance of the adjustment bolts that put tension on the hatch covers and secured them to the top of the coamings around the hatches. And then a song. But what caused the ship to take on water, enough to lose buoyancy and dive to the bottom so quickly, without a single cry for help, cannot be determined. McSorely had also ordered the pumps to be turned on in order to keep the ingress of water out of the cargo hold.By 4:10 PM, the list had not gotten any better and theFitzgeraldwas still taking on water, effectively sinking. The caribou were very aggressive, treeing the lighthouse keeper for hours on several occasions. For the boating safety class Tom treated us to footage of some of the many shipwrecks that he has dove over his own career which included a full unedited version of the Jacques Cousteau expedition. Had she sailed two days later, empty, for repairs (very good timing, actually) none of this would have happened. Cooper asked McSorley how they were doing. No. Join us at Islands Restaurant in Fullerton on Malvern Avenue.
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