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Upper Peninsula, MIJun 18, 2008
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Lighthouse and shipwreck museum at Whitefish Point on Lake Superior
Karyn and I getting diving certified for Lake Superior shipwrecks
Model of the Edmund Fitzgerald
| Well, at least it was not raining when we woke on Wednesday, but now we were having further problems with our GFI breaker. This meant a trip into the RV service center later in the week and also meant that I would be stuck using the outlets in the KOA bathroom to do my hair over the next few days (something that I do not really like to do all that much). We started the day with a drive north on US 123 to Whitefish Point which sits at the east end of Lake Superior on Whitefish Bay. This area is known as the “graveyard of the Great Lakes” due to the numerous shipwrecks which have occurred in the area over the past several hundred years. There have been over 500 shipwrecks on Lake Superior and over 300 hundred of them have occurred near Whitefish Bay. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum tells the stories of several of these shipwrecks, the majority of which were caused by horrible winter weather with high winds and large waves, fog, or collisions in the less than well marked shipping lanes. The last shipwreck to occur on Lake Superior, and the most well known one thanks to Gordon Lightfoot, was that of the Edmund Fitzgerald. The “Fitz”, as the ship was called, was one of the largest to traverse the Great Lakes, setting speed records as well as records for the amount of tonnage transported. In November 1975 the Edmund Fitzgerald was on its way down Lake Superior carrying 26,000 tons of taconite pellets. A terrible storm blew up that night, one of the worst the area has ever seen. Wind speeds were between 80 and 95 mph and waves more than 30 feet high were breaking over the bow of the ship. Although no one knows exactly what happened to the Fitz, the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald had been in radio contact with another ship following behind it, the Arthur M. Anderson, to let it know he was taking on water, listing to one side, and had lost its radar. After a huge wave hit the Arthur M. Anderson and continued its way towards the Fitz, radio contact was cut off and the Fitz was never heard from again. The ship sunk in 535 feet of water and all 29 people aboard perished. In 1995, the families of those who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald had the ship’s bell raised from its watery depths and replaced with a bell inscribed with the names of all those who were aboard. The ship’s restored bell resides in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum today. On the same grounds with the Shipwreck Museum are also the Whitefish Point Lighthouse and the restored Light Keeper’s house. The Light Keeper’s house provided an interesting depiction of what a lonely, desolate, monotonous job the Light Keeper had. This area of Michigan is still desolate today, so it was not difficult to imagine how even more desolate it must have been back in the 1800s. The Light Keeper and his family received room, board and about $600 per year to tend to the lighthouse and fog horns 24 X 7, 365 days per year. Days were spent polishing the fresnal lens (the one on display at the Keeper’s house was worth over $1 million and is absolutely beautiful. The glass and technology to make these fresnal lens no longer exists which increases the value of the few that remain), keeping the light lit from dusk through dawn, which required the mechanism to be wound by hand every 2.5 hours, ensuring the coal stove was kept warm enough to power the fog horn when needed, and tending to any shipwreck survivors. Not surprisingly, turnover in this job was extremely high. And interestingly, until the 1900s, the Light Keeper actually had to wear a uniform (who was going to see them?). The use of lighthouses for the protection of our maritime industry was a function created by the first Congress in 1787. This lighthouse at Whitefish Point was built in 1849 and was one of the first on Lake Superior. It remains in use today, although the lighthouse is now controlled automatically from Sault Ste. Marie. Sadly, the only day that the light did not shine on Lake Superior was the day the Edmund Fitzgerald sunk. After we finished our tour of the museums we worked our way east to Sault Ste. Marie, MI. This city sits across the shore from its sister city of the same name in Canada on the St. Mary’s River which connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron and calls itself Michigan’s first city. It also claims to be the third oldest city in the U.S. after St. Augustine and Sante Fe, New Mexico. Now, I cannot dispute this claim, but I did think it was odd that another city we were staying near, St. Ignace, also made the exact same claim. Regardless, Sault Ste. Marie, which also calls itself the “Soo”, is most well known today for its four locks that provide safe portage for ships moving from the higher Lake Superior to the lower Lake Huron (or vice versa). Together, the Great Lakes, all five of them, contain 20% of the world’s fresh water and 95% of the U.S. drinking water. Lake Superior is the largest lake (by surface area), the coldest of the Great Lakes, and the deepest with a maximum depth of 1,332 feet. Together these lakes form the largest inland waterway and are used primarily to transport ore, rock, coal, and grain. The locks are operated by the Army Corp of Engineers and at one time they moved more cargo than the Panama and Suez Canals combined. No fee is charged to move cargo through the Soo Locks. The Soo Locks also generates hydropower which is used to power the locks. The excess power (about 98%) is sold to the local power company. Along with observation points where we were able to see two different ships moving through the locks, there was an aging museum that drily presented more facts and figures than anybody could possibly grasp and showing movies made in the early 1990s by extremely boring engineer types that droned on and on about how the locks worked and how they were constructed. But being able to see the ships moving through the locks was pretty cool. |
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