I lived on an Island in Lake Huron for about 5 years and went visiting the Lake Superior area many times. To call it a lake does not really do it justice: it's an inland sea, and a most impressive one. I've seen the lake from the shore in more than one storm and it didn't look any different than the ocean, except that it seemed in many ways more violent. I asked the locals about it and they said that the lake is more violent than the sea in places but there wasn't any coherent explanation, it could be the steep rise of what eventually becomes the shoreline rather than the much more gradual one the ocean usually has.
There are also much lower periodicity waves in such constrained bodies called 'seiches':
Thanks for that, super interesting about sieches. A standing wave not directly from the moon or waves.From the wiki:
Lake seiches can occur very quickly: on July 13, 1995, a large seiche on Lake Superior caused the water level to fall and then rise again by one metre (three feet) within fifteen minutes, leaving some boats hanging from the docks on their mooring lines when the water retreated
In Chicago I’ve observed and measured a consistent 0.8kn (1.48 km/hr) current set flowing north after a long week of consistent breezes out of the north. The water just piles up in the shallow end of the lake and when the breeze dies that water needs to go somewhere.
Lake Michigan has the least turnover of all the lakes and when thinking about predicting current on it it’s good to imagine a 300 mile long bathtub.
Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.
I still remember the "oh I get it" moment when I visited Michigan as a teen and saw Lake Michigan for the first time.
Ha. Me too. I remember looking at Lake Champlain for the first time and commenting it wasn't that big. My friends looked at me like I was crazy. "You can see across it!" That was the day I learned how big Lake Michigan was compared to nearly every other lake on the planet.
I assume you thought the "hurricane west wind" line from the song was exaggerated. The winds down the middle of the lake, in certain seasons, are 80mph.
The captain of the Arthur M. Anderson later indicated that as it moved into the area where the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost (Fig. 2) waves were between 5.5 and 7.5 m and winds gusted between 70 kt (35 m s–1) and 75 kt (37.5 m s–1).
...
Wave heights of individual waves generally follow a Rayleigh distribution (Lonquet-Higgins 1952) so that the maximum wave height in 7-m seas, although rare and unlikely, could be as high as 14 m. It is particularly noteworthy that the most severe conditions in the simulations occurred between 0000 and 0100 UTC, coincident in time and location with the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.
For people interested in the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, along with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, consider visiting the Valley Camp museum (a lake freighter that has been made into a museum ship) in Sault Ste. Marie, MI and the Soo Locks and visitors center, right down the street.
Sadly, the days of getting to walk out onto the locks for "Engineer's Day" (held on the last Friday of June, typically) are over. In 2025 the public wasn't allowed into the operational area of the locks ("out of an abundance of caution").
> they are swept by Borean and dismasting
blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they
know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land,
however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight
ship with all its shrieking crew.
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the 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 wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
'Twas the witch of November come stealing
The dawn came late, and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came, it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
"Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At seven p.m., a main hatchway caved in, he said
"Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
-- Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
It's poetry, not code, but I've formatted it as code for line breaks:
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 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 weighed empty
That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the 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 feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railin'
And every man knew, as the captain did too
'Twas the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin'
"Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya"
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in, he said
"Fellas, it's been good to know ya"
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does anyone 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 miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
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
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is located at a depth of 530 feet (162 meters) below the surface of Lake Superior. That's an extremely risky technical deep dive. There were probably more people in space than non-saturation diving at this depth.
Presumably also open circuit not rebreather given this was mid 90s. It's a pity the article doesn't detail their dive plan, the gas quantities must have been staggering.
Nowadays this type of diving would be done using an eCCR (and backup open circuit), where some software on a microcontroller controls the amount of oxygen in a breathing loop. A scrubber (hopefully) removes the CO2. Changing the gas mixture as you go is required to reach these sorts of depths because oxygen becomes toxic at pressure, and gas density itself can cause issues with breathing.
Right, Terrence Tysall and Mike Zlatopolsky (Zee) dove the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1995 using open circuit gear. This article by Tysall gives some details of their dive plan.
500-foot waters but the ship was 700+ long. The size of cargo ships boggles the mind. The largest space rockets are toys compared to any modern cargo ship.
Good lord, ascent must've taken hours at that depth. I felt daring going down 40 meters in Belize, 164 in pitch black ice cold water, trimix and hours of deco gass on the way up? No thanks.
I feel for the families with their reactions to people diving to the wreck, especially the fear that it could become a tourist attraction, but people being so upset at the various submersible and diving teams is curious to me.
Of course, you can't know the true intentions of the teams, but they all seem to have gone down there with great respect for the ship as a gravesite.
> Still, Mixter and the team were labeled "ghouls and pirates," and "the state of Michigan actually passed a law against recording bodies on shipwrecks that are less than 50 years old," he said.
Assumedly, as of today, the Edmund Fitzgerald has aged out of that law?
The latest episode of the NYTimes book review podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinking-of-the-edm...] is a really interesting interview with John U. Bacon who just wrote a book on the Edmund Fitzgerald, called The Gales of November. Quite interesting if, like me, you didn't know anything about the historical event beyond the song.
“We’re holding our own” - Captain McSorley., 7:10pm, 5 minutes before contact was reported lost. Seemingly more a story of patriarchal arrogance than force of nature.
That may be the case but that seems unfair from that statement alone. It could just as well be some kind of way to keep panic at bay at a time where you need all your wits. Couldn't that lead you to underestimate the danger you are in ? And that's not even accounting interpretation errors under stress and unknown unknowns.
> On the fateful evening of November 10, 1975, McSorley reported he had never seen bigger seas in his life.[70] Paquette, captain of Wilfred Sykes, out in the same storm, said, "I'll tell anyone that it was a monster sea washing solid water over the deck of every vessel out there."[172] The USCG did not broadcast that all ships should seek safe anchorage until after 3:35 p.m. on November 10, many hours after the weather was upgraded from a gale to a storm.[55]
McSorley was known as a "heavy weather captain"[173] who, according to George Burgner, "'beat hell' out of the Fitzgerald and 'very seldom ever hauled up for weather'".[140] Paquette held the opinion that negligence caused Edmund Fitzgerald to founder. He said, "in my opinion, all the subsequent events arose because (McSorley) kept pushing that ship and didn't have enough training in weather forecasting to use common sense and pick a route out of the worst of the wind and seas."
You do make a good case for your claim ! You swayed me. Masculine recklessness-as-toughness, also known as patriarchal arrogance, seems indeed to have sunk that ship.
I lived on an Island in Lake Huron for about 5 years and went visiting the Lake Superior area many times. To call it a lake does not really do it justice: it's an inland sea, and a most impressive one. I've seen the lake from the shore in more than one storm and it didn't look any different than the ocean, except that it seemed in many ways more violent. I asked the locals about it and they said that the lake is more violent than the sea in places but there wasn't any coherent explanation, it could be the steep rise of what eventually becomes the shoreline rather than the much more gradual one the ocean usually has.
There are also much lower periodicity waves in such constrained bodies called 'seiches':
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche
There is a museum dedicated to the wrecks, well worth visiting, but do bring earplugs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Shipwreck_Museum
Thanks for that, super interesting about sieches. A standing wave not directly from the moon or waves.From the wiki:
Lake seiches can occur very quickly: on July 13, 1995, a large seiche on Lake Superior caused the water level to fall and then rise again by one metre (three feet) within fifteen minutes, leaving some boats hanging from the docks on their mooring lines when the water retreated
In Chicago I’ve observed and measured a consistent 0.8kn (1.48 km/hr) current set flowing north after a long week of consistent breezes out of the north. The water just piles up in the shallow end of the lake and when the breeze dies that water needs to go somewhere.
Lake Michigan has the least turnover of all the lakes and when thinking about predicting current on it it’s good to imagine a 300 mile long bathtub.
> it’s good to imagine a 300 mile long bathtub
Harrods was destroyed by the Vogons.
Hilarious comment, thank you. Now I will have to go and see every bathtub from now on as a tiny Lake Michigan...
Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.
I still remember the "oh I get it" moment when I visited Michigan as a teen and saw Lake Michigan for the first time.
Growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan made any lake I could see the other side of feel like more of a pond than a lake.
Ha. Me too. I remember looking at Lake Champlain for the first time and commenting it wasn't that big. My friends looked at me like I was crazy. "You can see across it!" That was the day I learned how big Lake Michigan was compared to nearly every other lake on the planet.
I assume you thought the "hurricane west wind" line from the song was exaggerated. The winds down the middle of the lake, in certain seasons, are 80mph.
https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/lessons/by-broad-co... and Reexamination of the 9–10 November 1975 “Edmund Fitzgerald” Storm Using Today’s Technology - https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/wp-content/uploads/... (pdf from 2006)
Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.
For people interested in the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, along with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, consider visiting the Valley Camp museum (a lake freighter that has been made into a museum ship) in Sault Ste. Marie, MI and the Soo Locks and visitors center, right down the street.
Sadly, the days of getting to walk out onto the locks for "Engineer's Day" (held on the last Friday of June, typically) are over. In 2025 the public wasn't allowed into the operational area of the locks ("out of an abundance of caution").
From Moby Dick, on the Great Lakes:
> they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AMoby-Dick_(1851)_US_ed...
The ship was the pride of the American side Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin As the 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 wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound And a wave broke over the railing And every man knew, as the captain did too 'Twas the witch of November come stealing The dawn came late, and the breakfast had to wait When the gales of November came slashin' When afternoon came, it was freezin' rain In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin' "Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya" At seven p.m., a main hatchway caved in, he said "Fellas, it's been good to know ya" The captain wired in he had water comin' in And the good ship and crew was in peril And later that night when his lights went outta sight Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
-- Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
It's poetry, not code, but I've formatted it as code for line breaks:
Thanks for doing this. The song is beautiful and I highly recommend folks listen to it on Spotify/Youtube/whatever.
The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is located at a depth of 530 feet (162 meters) below the surface of Lake Superior. That's an extremely risky technical deep dive. There were probably more people in space than non-saturation diving at this depth.
Presumably also open circuit not rebreather given this was mid 90s. It's a pity the article doesn't detail their dive plan, the gas quantities must have been staggering.
Nowadays this type of diving would be done using an eCCR (and backup open circuit), where some software on a microcontroller controls the amount of oxygen in a breathing loop. A scrubber (hopefully) removes the CO2. Changing the gas mixture as you go is required to reach these sorts of depths because oxygen becomes toxic at pressure, and gas density itself can cause issues with breathing.
There's more detail on the dive in this account: https://cambrianfoundation.org/2000/02/28/1995-expedition/
This one says twelve minutes of exploration at the bottom.
Right, Terrence Tysall and Mike Zlatopolsky (Zee) dove the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1995 using open circuit gear. This article by Tysall gives some details of their dive plan.
https://advanceddivermagazine.com/articles/fitz/fitz.html
500-foot waters but the ship was 700+ long. The size of cargo ships boggles the mind. The largest space rockets are toys compared to any modern cargo ship.
The relevant xkcd - https://xkcd.com/1040/ (there's a large version of it too)
There's a mentioned fun fact that is what reminded me of this:
Elsecomment there was a mention of diving, there are lines for diving records too.And thank you for this tidbit, down there at the bottom of the Marianas Trench:
"MYSTERIOUS DOOR WHICH JAMES CAMERON BUILT HIS SUB TO REACH AND OPEN. HE WILL NOT SAY WHAT HE FOUND WITHIN."
o_O
Good lord, ascent must've taken hours at that depth. I felt daring going down 40 meters in Belize, 164 in pitch black ice cold water, trimix and hours of deco gass on the way up? No thanks.
According to TFA they had 15 minutes at the wreck, 4.5 hours of ascent. At about 34 degrees water temp.
It may have been 15 minutes to both go down and explore, it mentioned 4 minutes at the bottom. The quote: "15-minute descent and exploration"
[culturally related]
Gordon Lightfoot, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI
Home Free → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um1PCCkyYHE
Headstones https://youtu.be/Y8LBkYjniTU
I feel for the families with their reactions to people diving to the wreck, especially the fear that it could become a tourist attraction, but people being so upset at the various submersible and diving teams is curious to me.
Of course, you can't know the true intentions of the teams, but they all seem to have gone down there with great respect for the ship as a gravesite.
On Sunday, there was a service commemorating its sinking - "Old Mariners' Church in Detroit rings fabled bell to mark 50 years since Edmund Fitzgerald sinking " https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...
This was interesting:
> Still, Mixter and the team were labeled "ghouls and pirates," and "the state of Michigan actually passed a law against recording bodies on shipwrecks that are less than 50 years old," he said.
Assumedly, as of today, the Edmund Fitzgerald has aged out of that law?
The latest episode of the NYTimes book review podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sinking-of-the-edm...] is a really interesting interview with John U. Bacon who just wrote a book on the Edmund Fitzgerald, called The Gales of November. Quite interesting if, like me, you didn't know anything about the historical event beyond the song.
“We’re holding our own” - Captain McSorley., 7:10pm, 5 minutes before contact was reported lost. Seemingly more a story of patriarchal arrogance than force of nature.
That may be the case but that seems unfair from that statement alone. It could just as well be some kind of way to keep panic at bay at a time where you need all your wits. Couldn't that lead you to underestimate the danger you are in ? And that's not even accounting interpretation errors under stress and unknown unknowns.
> On the fateful evening of November 10, 1975, McSorley reported he had never seen bigger seas in his life.[70] Paquette, captain of Wilfred Sykes, out in the same storm, said, "I'll tell anyone that it was a monster sea washing solid water over the deck of every vessel out there."[172] The USCG did not broadcast that all ships should seek safe anchorage until after 3:35 p.m. on November 10, many hours after the weather was upgraded from a gale to a storm.[55] McSorley was known as a "heavy weather captain"[173] who, according to George Burgner, "'beat hell' out of the Fitzgerald and 'very seldom ever hauled up for weather'".[140] Paquette held the opinion that negligence caused Edmund Fitzgerald to founder. He said, "in my opinion, all the subsequent events arose because (McSorley) kept pushing that ship and didn't have enough training in weather forecasting to use common sense and pick a route out of the worst of the wind and seas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald
You do make a good case for your claim ! You swayed me. Masculine recklessness-as-toughness, also known as patriarchal arrogance, seems indeed to have sunk that ship.
Thank you. :) I try to be careful with my claims, but when I find a big one I don’t shy away from it.
Yeah, reducing patriarchal arrogance is a major opportunity for improvement in our societies.