![]() ![]() They’re considered so important that a federal preserve, the 448-square-mile Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary ( has been created to protect and preserve them. More than 200 ships have gone down in Shipwreck Alley, just off the northeast coast of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The story includes the lighthouses and their keepers who saved many ships and sailors from disaster, and the watery graves of those they couldn’t. Here it’s about Lake Huron – her fury as well as her beauty. Some of those wrecks are on Michigan’s Sunrise Coast. “A conservative estimate,” said Farnquist, adding that the true number is more likely 10,000 to 12,000 shipwrecks. More than 6,000 ships and 35,000 lives have been lost on the Great Lakes since record keeping began in 1679. The bell is tolled 30 times – 29 times for each of the men lost on the Fitzgerald, and once for all mariners who have lost their lives on the Great Lakes. ![]() The museum’s official season is May 1 – October 31, but it always opens on November 10. A replacement bell was put to rest in the water with the Fitzgerald. Twenty years later her bell was brought up, ringing as it surfaced, and became the focal point for the museum. The Fitzgerald went down 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point, in Canadian waters, on the evening of November 10. The laker lost its radar, the hatches opened and took on water, and the cargo of iron ore pellets shifted. He chose a northern route, hugging the Canadian shore, in an effort to escape the rough seas. It was the boat’s last scheduled trip of the season, and the captain’s last scheduled trip before retirement. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong that night.” All of a sudden it was upgraded to gale force. “The weather was supposed to be nasty, but nothing the ship hadn’t been through a hundred times. “The Fitzgerald left in rough weather,” said Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum ( in Paradise, Mich. The sign for the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum gift shop, with its signature logo, is overshadowed by the Whitefish Point light tower. She took on a load of iron ore in Superior, Wis., and sailed out onto the Big Lake, bound for Detroit, on November 9, 1975. The sinking of the Fitzgerald is perhaps the Great Lakes’ most famous disaster. The gales of November came early in 1975, sending the Edmund Fitzgerald to the bottom of Lake Superior and prompting folk singer Gordon Lightfoot to memorialize the event in song. Ernest McSorley went down with his ship, too. The Titanic carried more than 2,200 people on her fateful voyage only a few more than 700 survived. Murdoch, and Lightoller.” Both officers supervised launchings of the lifeboats. “There was a lot of heroism,” said Bishop. Upon leaving, he can check his passenger in the Memorial Gallery to see if that passenger survived or perished. Upon entering the exhibit, each visitor receives a replica boarding pass of an actual passenger. (Photo by Elizabeth Granger)Īnd there are the individual stories of many. ![]() In 1995, 20 years after her sinking, the bell was raised from the Edmund Fitzgerald and took a place of honor in the gallery of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. ![]()
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