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Posted
1 hour ago, VABuckeye said:

50 years ago today.

 

Instagram has been a gold mine for Lightfoot stans like myself this week.

Posted

1920px-Edmund_Fitzgerald,_1971,_3_of_4_(

Some fun factoids.

"Lakers" were frequently owned as an investment by insurance companies.  Edmund Fitzgerald was an insurance executive.

It's kind of fascinating to me that Great Lakes shipping developed its own kinds of vessels for bulk transport, mainly iron ore, but also grain.

One of the more interesting variants of a lake freighter was the "whaleback."

1024px-UP_digCenter_AK01b350_Whaleback_J

 

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Posted
There's a book coming out about the wreck that includes the story of the song, which is actually quite interesting.  I posted a link to a RS story about it on the GL thread.
https://www.amazon.com/Gales-November-Untold-Edmund-Fitzgerald/dp/1324094648
It's out and an excellent read. The author does a fantastic job detailing the history of Great Lakes shipping & what made it so dangerous. The Big Fitz was THE freighter, and her exploits were legendary.

As the book details, it's almost never one singular event that causes a ship to founder. It's a series of dominoes that get out of control in a hurry. In the end, the "how" will never be known. But the greatest legacy is that there hasn't been a commercial vessel sinking on the Great Lakes since.

I was almost 6 when she went down & living in Newport, a port town on the Mississippi just outside of Saint Paul. My grandmother was from Eveleth, MN, and most of her brothers spent their lives working in the mines or supporting the industry of the Mesabi Range. None were sailors. They were more fearful of the storms on Superior than the earth caving in on them.

I distinctly remember listening to the reports on the AM radio that day. It was the only thing the adults talked about over the coming days. The pastor at our Lutheran church led a very somber service the following Sunday. We all sang Amazing Grace. Lots of tough, blue collar men who worked in the local steel mill, stockyards, ports & train depot were misty eyed that day. The sinking of the Mighty Fitz was a transformative moment in my life.
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Posted

I guess maybe we should point out that a lot of US iron ore was mined in northern Minnesota and Michigan.

And that ore was put to use in steelmaking plants in Detroit and Ohio, and places like Gary, Indiana.

great-lakes-map.gif&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=72941

So, even though they are inland lakes, the routes sailed by the ships were pretty akin to oceangoing routes.

 

Posted
12 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:

So, even though they are inland lakes, the routes sailed by the ships were pretty akin to oceangoing routes.

 

They are and they aren't. The lakes present a very unique set of challenges and dangers relative to the ocean. The speed at which weather can deteriorate is probably the biggest one from my experience.

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Posted

The book also details how the lighter, freshwater seas create more violent green waves vs the heavier salt water oceans. The speed & ferocity of the Great Lakes storms is an entirely different beast.

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Posted

It's also pretty amazing to think how dangerous the design of the freighters were i order to maximize the cargo they could transport through the narrow Soo locks. They were floating yard sticks, with 26,000 tons of taconite onboard. Can you imagine trying to navigate a 720' ship in 30' seas?

"We're holding our own."

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Posted
23 minutes ago, GhostOfTomJoad said:

The book also details how the lighter, freshwater seas create more violent green waves vs the heavier salt water oceans. The speed & ferocity of the Great Lakes storms is an entirely different beast.

Generally, it's the shorter period which gives much steeper stacked waves that's a bitch. But the lake waves still are not nearly as powerful at their worst than ocean waves.

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Posted
2 minutes ago, G650 said:

Generally, it's the shorter period which gives much steeper stacked waves that's a bitch. But the lake waves still are not nearly as powerful at their worst than ocean waves.

Yeah, that's an interesting phenomenon, the battering effect of the waves is worse, but the relatively short period means a ship is less likely to get broken between them.

Also kind of interesting, the freshwater environment means the ships last a lot longer, so there were riveted hulls and steam propulsion long past their obsolescence in oceangoing vessels.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_St._Marys_Challenger

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Posted

Back to the song:

Gordon had been working on a sea shanty based on an Irish reel. He didn't have a title or words. He went down to get a cup of coffee while writing in the attic of his Toronto house on November 9th and as the storms hit his windows he exclaimed "it must be hell on Superior tonight."

He started putting the words together after reading an account of the sinking a few weeks later. He never intended to record it because he feared it could be seen as exploitive. But during recording session breaks the band would hear him strumming this tune.

He'd fi ished recording Summertime Dream early & still had 2 days of studio time paid for. The engineer convinced him to play "that shanty" and he reluctantly did. Nobody in the studio had heard it before. The audio track you hear on the song was not just the first take, but the first time they played it through.

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