The Legend Lives On….

Linda’s Monthly Monday Morning Moaning’s for November 3, 2025.

At 8:30 a.m. on November 9, 1975, in Superior, Wisconsin, the loading began of taconite pellets on the Edmund Fitzgerald, and by 2:52 p.m. the ‘Fitz’ sailed past the Superior break wall and out into the vast expanse of Lake Superior, headed to Zug Island in Detroit. At 2:00 a.m. on November 10th, the National Weather Service upgrades an earlier gale warning to a storm warning.

At noon and through midday, with the Arthur Anderson freighter trailing the ‘Fitz’, the storm, with high winds turned into a blinding snowstorm, the ‘Fitz’ asked the Anderson to stay by her, when she radioed she had a ‘bad list’. The last contact with the Arthur Anderson was at 7:10 when they were told the ‘Fitz’ was “holding her own”. By 7:25, the Edmund Fitzgerald had disappeared from radar and from the visual sight of the Anderson, while in Canadian waters on Lake Superior.

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee. The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy. With a load of iron ore, twenty six thousand tons more, than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighted empty. That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed, when the gales of November came early.”

One week from today, on Monday November 10, comes the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Now the remains of the ‘Fitz’ lies in 530 feet of water in Lake Superior, just north of Whitefish Point, Michigan. The ship rests in two major sections, with the bow sitting upright with a partial burial in the lakebed, while the stern lies capsized at a steep angle 170 feet away. Between them, scattered debris includes hatch covers, hull plating, and taconite pellets from her final cargo.

“The ship was the pride of the American side, coming back from some mill in Wisconsin, As big freighters go, it was bigger than most with a crew and good captain well seasoned. Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms, when they left fully loaded for Cleveland. And later that night when the ship’s bell rang, could it be the north wind they’d been feeling?”

The structure is still largely intact, though it shows signs of collapse from its decades underwater. The surveys taken have recorded a gradual deterioration of the deck plating and the openings in the hull, but the outline of the ship remains recognizable. The site is treated as gravesite and is legally protected by the Canadian government, so diving is restricted to observation only.

“Does any one know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours? The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay if they’d put fifteen more mile behind her. They might have split up or they might have capsized, they might have broken deep and took water. All that remains is the faces and the names of the wives and the sons and the daughters.”

In 1995, the ship’s original bell was recovered and replaced with a replica bell. The recovered bell has been preserved and is displayed at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, in Michigan along with the Whitefish Point Lighthouse, is a memorial to the 29 seamen who lost their lives.

“In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed in the Maritime Sailors Cathedral. The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald. The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down on the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee, Superior, they said, never gives up her dead, when the gales of November comes early.”

A gracious thank you to all the Mariners, who have sailed the Great Lakes and made this their life work. Thank you to John U. Bacon for his just published new book the ‘The Gales of November’, and Ella Andra-Warner for her book ‘Edmund Fitzgerald, The Legendary Great Lake Shipwreck’, and the estate of the late Gordon Lightfoot for partial use of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, a most beautiful work for memorizing these very brave seamen, the ‘Lakers’ who travel our Great Lakes.

On this ‘wee note’ till Monday December 1, 2025.

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