Lake Superior · November 9 and 10, 1975
The Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, on an unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon with 29 men aboard. Twenty-nine hours later she was gone, without a distress call, 17 miles from shelter.
This is the ship, the trip and the water, drawn to scale.
I · The ship
In February 1957 an insurance company in Milwaukee ordered an ore boat. Northwestern Mutual paid Great Lakes Engineering Works of River Rouge, Michigan, $8.4 million for the largest ship on the Great Lakes: 729 feet, within a foot of the limit for the new St. Lawrence Seaway.
More than 900 people worked on her. On June 7, 1958, in front of a crowd of more than 10,000, she slid sideways into the Detroit River. Elizabeth Fitzgerald broke the champagne.
The ship was named for Elizabeth's husband, the company's president, whose grandfather and five great-uncles had been lake captains. He had argued for other names. The board voted for his while he was out of the room.
Every drawing of the ship and the water on this page uses one scale: 3 pixels to the foot.
For 17 seasons she carried taconite from Minnesota's iron ports down to the mills of Detroit and Toledo. A round trip took about five days. Six times she set the record for a season's haul.
One mark for each round trip: 748, more than a million miles.
One of her captains, Peter Pulcer, played music over the intercom on the St. Clair and Detroit rivers and narrated the passage through the Soo Locks.
In 1969, 1971 and 1973 the Coast Guard raised her load line. Each change let her carry more by riding deeper. By 1975 she sat about three feet lower than her designers intended, with her deck 11.5 feet above the water.
Her hull in cross-section, loaded, with a 25-foot sea drawn behind it and a person on deck.
Her master that November was Ernest McSorley of Toledo, 63, known as a heavy-weather captain who seldom slowed for it. He had sailed for more than forty years and meant to retire when the season ended. Twenty-eight men sailed with him. The youngest was 20.
II · The last trip
The chart below opens wide, over the middle of the continent, then closes on Lake Superior and follows both ships hour by hour. The streaks are wind. Rust is the Fitzgerald. Amber is the Anderson.
Fitzgerald Anderson · tracks and wind reconstructed
Sunday, 7:00 AM
It reached 74 degrees in Superior earlier this week, and the warmth has held across the Great Lakes. Duluth starts this morning at 28. By afternoon it will be back in the 50s there, and 73 in Toledo, home to McSorley and three of his crew.
Captain Cooper of the Anderson remembered the day: just ripples on the water, sunny and warm for November.
Sunday morning
The warmth is the warning. South winds are carrying Gulf air north, ahead of a low that formed overnight over Kansas.
Forecasters are also watching a weaker low sliding past north of the lake, with cold Canadian air behind it. Later accounts call what follows a collision of the two.
2:15 PM
Superior, Wisconsin. The Fitzgerald leaves Burlington Northern Dock No. 1 with 26,116 long tons of taconite for a steel mill on Zug Island, near Detroit. It is in the 50s, with a light northeast wind.
About 4:30 PM
The Arthur M. Anderson leaves Two Harbors, Minnesota, for Gary, Indiana, under Captain Jesse Cooper. The two ships fall in together and stay in radio contact.
7:00 PM
Gale warnings are up for all of Lake Superior. A low is deepening over Iowa and coming this way.
Both captains take the long way: north, into the lee of the Ontario shore.
Monday, 1:00 AM
The Fitzgerald reports northeast winds of 52 knots and ten-foot waves. An hour later the gale warning becomes a storm warning.
3:00 AM
The Fitzgerald pulls ahead of the Anderson. She will lead the rest of the way.
7:00 AM
The low is over Marquette at 982 millibars, eleven lower than twelve hours ago. The Fitzgerald reports northeast 35 knots.
10:00 AM
The center of the storm passes almost over the ships. For a while the wind drops to about 10 knots.
Warm Gulf air and Canadian cold now turn around one center, and it is still deepening.
Behind the low, over the western lake, a northwest wind is building past 30.
1:00 PM
North of Michipicoten Island both ships turn southeast for Whitefish Bay, about eight miles apart.
The wind has come round to the northwest, and the air behind the low is in the 30s. The Ontario shore no longer shelters them. The wind now has most of the lake to build waves across.
About 3:15 PM
Caribou Island. Watching his radar, Cooper thinks the Fitzgerald is passing closer to Six Fathom Shoal than he would want to be. Then snow and spray hide her.
At 3:30 McSorley radios: a fence rail down, two vents lost, a list. Minutes later the Soo Locks close and the Coast Guard tells every ship to find safe anchorage.
5:20 PM
A wave smashes a lifeboat on the Anderson. Cooper logs steady northwest winds of 58 knots, gusts to 70, seas of 18 to 25 feet.
7:00 PM
NOAA's later simulation of the storm puts its worst hour here: west-northwest winds above 45 knots and seas over 23 feet, with the Fitzgerald on the eastern edge of them.
Six hours earlier or later, one of its authors said, and she could have missed the worst.
About 7:15 PM
46°59.9′ North, 85°06.6′ West.
Seventeen miles from shelter.
III · The scope
By late afternoon the Fitzgerald had lost both of her radars. The only people who could still see her were on the Anderson, following ten miles behind, watching a mark on a scope.
This is that scope.
Anderson's radar, reconstructed · 24-mile range · rings every 6 mi
3:30 PM
Captain Ernest McSorley radios the Anderson. The Fitzgerald has topside damage, two vents gone and a list. Both pumps are running. He asks the Anderson to stay with him to Whitefish Point.
4:10 PM
McSorley calls again. Both radars are dead. Cooper agrees to track the Fitzgerald on the Anderson's set and call out her position.
From here on, this scope is the only picture anyone has of her.
4:39 PM
McSorley asks the Coast Guard whether the light and radio beacon at Whitefish Point are working. The answer: neither appears to be.
About 5:30 PM
A saltwater ship, the Avafors, asks how the Fitzgerald is doing. McSorley's answer comes back through shouting on the bridge: I have a bad list, lost both radars.
Heavy seas are coming over her deck.
Just before 7:00 PM
Two large waves hit the Anderson and throw water 35 feet above her waterline. They keep going, toward the Fitzgerald.
7:10 PM
The Anderson radios ahead. She is about ten miles behind and gaining slowly. Another ship, nineteen miles out, will pass clear to the west. Then a question: how is the Fitzgerald making out with her problems?
We are holding our own.
7:15 PM
A snow squall closes over the Fitzgerald. Snow and sea return fill the scope where she was.
This is ordinary. Squalls hide ships all the time.
7:20 PM
The squall passes. The other ship is still there.
No distress call was ever sent.
The sweep keeps turning.
7:55 PM
The Anderson tells the Coast Guard she has lost the Fitzgerald, by eye and on radar.
9:00 PM
The Coast Guard has no search vessel within reach. It asks the Anderson, safe in Whitefish Bay, to turn around and go back out. She goes.
IV · The water
The Anderson and the William Clay Ford searched through the night. Aircraft and cutters followed. They found lifeboats, rafts and debris, and no one.
Four days later a Navy aircraft built to hunt submarines found her on the bottom, in two large pieces.
The rust outline ahead is the Fitzgerald once more, this time stood on her bow as a ruler.
She was 729 feet long. The water where she lies is 530 feet deep. Stood on her bow, this much of her would still be in the air.
The waves here ran 25 feet from trough to crest. The one below is drawn to scale. About one in a thousand could have reached 46.
A person, 6 feet.
The height of her hull, keel to deck.
Her width.
The stern section, as it lies today, is this long. The bow section is 276.
Ninety feet to go. She was longer than this lake is deep.
The bottom.
Lake bottom · 46°59.9′ N, 85°06.6′ W
The bow sits upright in the mud. The stern lies upside down about 170 feet away. Between them are torn steel and taconite pellets. No one was recovered. The wreck is a grave.
Schematic plan view built from the lengths, headings and separation in the 1976 survey. It is not a sonar image.
In May 1976 a Navy robot, CURV III, spent twelve dives filming her: 43,000 feet of videotape and 900 photographs. The name on the stern read upside down.
V · After
No one saw her go, and no one aboard lived to say. Fifty-one years of reports, dives and books have produced four main explanations and no proof.
Hatch covers that did not seal let water into the hold for hours, until she lost buoyancy and dove. The report adds that the cause could not be conclusively determined.
One or more hatch covers collapsed under the weight of boarding seas and the hold flooded all at once. One board member dissented and blamed the shoal.
She grazed Six Fathom Shoal off Caribou Island and was holed. Photographs from dives in 1994 show no damage to her stern, propeller or rudder.
The seas that struck the Anderson reached the Fitzgerald minutes later. Already low and listing, she drove her bow into one and did not come back up.
Storms like that one are not rare. NOAA's researchers found that eastern Lake Superior sees conditions of that size every two to six years. What changed was the ships and the forecasts. No major commercial vessel has been lost on the Great Lakes since.
In 1976 Gordon Lightfoot, who had read about the wreck in Newsweek, released a ballad about it. It is the reason most people know her name.
The wreck lies in Ontario waters. Since 2006 a protected zone has reached 500 meters around it, and diving there requires a license.
VI · Twenty-nine
The ship's bell was raised in 1995 at the families' request. A replica engraved with these names took its place on the wreck. The original rings at Whitefish Point each November 10, once for every man aboard, and once more for every sailor lost on the Great Lakes.
The bell you hear is synthesized. It is not a recording of the Fitzgerald's bell.