The Gales Of November

What sinks a ship that everyone calls unsinkable? In this book, you learn the Edmund Fitzgerald didn’t go down because of one error or one storm; it failed at the intersection of physics, profit, culture, and chance. The Great Lakes behave like oceans compressed into narrow, shoal-studded corridors; shipping companies pushed steel to its profitable limits; mariners made reasonable choices with incomplete data; and a rare, two-storm collision turned prudent seamanship into tragic timing. The book’s core argument is that the Fitzgerald’s loss is a systems failure—a chain where small, defensible decisions add up to catastrophe.

To see the chain, you have to look across disciplines. You start with wave physics on inland seas: short, steep, fast-period waves that induce brutal hogging and sagging on 700-foot hulls. Then you add economics: postwar demand and taconite pellets made bigger, thinner, fuller ships irresistible, while freeboard standards quietly loosened and dockside tricks squeezed in extra tons. Next you consider design: modular welding, pump placement, and missing sensors that made hidden flooding easy and corrective action hard. Layer on culture—competitive captains, engineers who quietly control turbine power, and a “silent-dude” radio etiquette—and you begin to understand how human norms can magnify or mute danger.

The lakes that act like oceans

Lake Superior is not a placid bowl; it’s an inland sea with a long fetch and a nasty habit of producing four-to-eight-second waves that hammer a long hull before it can recover. Unlike the ocean’s gentle ten-to-sixteen-second swell, Superior’s short-period waves lift bow and stern while leaving the midsection unsupported—then flip the stress a few seconds later. That repeated bending (hogging and sagging) fatigues steel the way a paperclip fails when you flex it back and forth. Factor in exponential wave energy growth with rising wind and you see why the “gales of November” are feared: 58+ mph winds and 20–30-foot seas imply occasional 40–60-foot rogues by simple statistics (Rayleigh distribution), a hazard sailors can’t out-bravado.

Profit trims the margins

Postwar industry needed iron, and Professor Edward W. Davis’s taconite process delivered uniform, dense pellets that loaded and unloaded cleanly. Efficiency bred ambition: Northwestern Mutual funded a ship tuned to the Soo Locks’ maximum size—729 by 75 feet—so every voyage converted inches of freeboard into paying cargo. Regulators granted extra draft; crews shaved more by draining water tanks or heating deck steel to contract it. The Fitzgerald often carried 26,000-plus long tons late in the season, leaving as little as 11.5 feet of freeboard. On paper, that’s legal; in green water and freezing spray, it’s a tightrope.

Design bets with hidden tails

Modular welding saved weight and added speed but changed fatigue behavior. The ship’s six big pumps sat aft in Hold #3, assuming water would run downhill; there were no required electronic hold sounders to warn of hidden flooding. Taconite’s clay-binder pellets absorb water like a sponge, masking ingress and adding weight that pumps can’t easily clear. Add late-fall icing—hundreds of tons of frozen spray that lower stability—and you have a vessel optimized for throughput with thinner safety cushions when wind and water conspire.

People, pride, and the unspoken rules

Captain Ernest McSorley was the consummate pro—quiet, steady, and respected. Great Lakes culture prizes such composure, and engineers often wield quiet veto power over speed by changing turbine nozzles rather than throttling (as the Anderson’s First Engineer Harry Ashcroft did that night, likely saving lives). Captains also avoid broadcasting vulnerability on open radio—the “don’t put it on the air” norm that preserves pride but can slow help. These norms matter when you lose radar, beacons flicker, and you’re navigating an unfamiliar northern route in a whiteout past Caribou Island and Six Fathom Shoal.

Meteorology turns prudence into peril

Two systems—a southwestern low loaded with warm moisture and an Alberta Clipper’s cold blast—collided and steered their worst winds along Superior’s southern shore toward Whitefish Bay. Forecasts lagged reality, moving from “typical” to gale to storm warnings as conditions surpassed expectations. McSorley’s northward route, prudent to avoid open-lake fetch, unintentionally set a timing trap: the Fitzgerald met the storm’s concentrated fury at the lake’s eastern choke point with failing instruments and rising seas. Slowing down (“checking down”) to nurse topside damage bought control but ceded time to worsening weather and potential flooding.

No single smoking gun

The clues—torn fence rail, missing vents, a reported list, released winch cable, crushed lifeboats, a two-piece wreck—support several plausible failure paths: a shoal strike breaching the hull; hatch or clamp failures admitting green water; progressive flooding via vents and access points; or a rogue-wave sequence that imposed lethal hog-sag cycles. What the record agrees on is speed: there was no Mayday, no organized abandonment. The end came so fast that even McSorley’s final calm—“We are holding our own”—masked how close the ship was to the edge.

Why it still matters

Afterward, the search revealed confusion and courage; Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad fixed the loss in public memory; families turned grief into advocacy that won protection for the wreck and recovery of the bell (1995). Most importantly, the industry changed: better forecasts, electronics, reporting norms, and a stronger bias toward caution. In the decades since, the Great Lakes have not lost a single commercial ship—a record born of hard lessons learned at terrible cost.

Key Idea

The Fitzgerald’s story shows how marginal gains—an inch of freeboard, a few extra knots, a shortcut in whiteouts—compound into systemic risk when weather, design choices, and human norms line up the wrong way.

If you imagine lakes as tame and oceans as wild, Lake Superior exists to correct you. The book details how Superior and the other Great Lakes replicate ocean physics but compress space and time. That compression means locally generated waves, short periods, and steep faces that hit big ships more quickly and more often than the long-rolling swells of the open sea. When you’re on a 729-foot freighter, what matters most is not just wave height—it’s period, sequence, and how those forces map onto your hull’s weakest modes.

Short period, big punishment

On the ocean, ten-to-sixteen-second swells give a long hull time to recover between peaks. Superior’s four-to-eight-second rhythm doesn’t. It pitches the bow skyward and lifts the stern just as the midships hangs unsupported—then reverses a few seconds later. Naval architects call those cycles hogging and sagging. Every cycle accumulates fatigue in welded joints and thin plates, the maritime version of bending a paperclip back and forth. Captains who “ride the troughs” too long or take a bad angle on steep seas deliver punishing loads to the structure, even if they never see a single “monster” wave.

Energy grows faster than your instincts

Wind and waves don’t scale linearly; their power rises dramatically as speeds increase. When winds climb from 20 to 40 mph, your risk doesn’t double—it multiplies. Buoy data show 28.5-foot waves in modern storms (Guy Meadows’ records), and once significant wave heights reach the mid-teens, rogue waves become statistically inevitable. Oceanographers model this with the Rayleigh distribution: in thousands of waves, some will reach twice the average height (and a few will exceed even that). On the lakes, where your transit time across a storm section might be hours instead of days, “rare” becomes “likely in this shift.”

Ice turns spray into ballast

Late-fall storms add a third dimension to danger: weight. Sea spray freezes instantly on cold, unsalted decks and superstructures, layering hundreds of tons of ice. That extra mass lowers freeboard, produces list, and dulls a ship’s steering response. You won’t capsize from ice alone on a ship the size of the Fitzgerald, but ice works like hidden ballast exactly when you need agility to meet short, steep seas. It’s one more slow variable that makes you vulnerable to a fast one (a rogue sequence, a whiteout, a shoal).

Geography that multiplies risk

Superior’s shape funnels energy toward Whitefish Bay, narrowing into the St. Marys River and Soo Locks. The 100-mile Shipwreck Coast has claimed hundreds of vessels because it compresses fetch into a choke point lined with shoals like Six Fathom (as shallow as ~11 feet in places) and obstacles like Caribou Island. You can’t simply “give it sea room” the way you might offshore; your exits are fixed, the water is confined, and the waves keep punching. The 1913 White Hurricane—with 35-foot waves and 80 mph winds—proved early that lake storms can rival open-ocean ferocity. Later, the Carl D. Bradley (1958) and Daniel J. Morrell (1966) split in heavy seas, grim previews of how hog-sag fatigue and short-period slamming can destroy long freighters.

Taken together, the lake’s physics, seasonality, and geography assure you of one thing: on Superior, even routine runs can turn violent quickly. The difference between a good story at the bar and a headline depends on how much margin you kept in draft, speed, and redundancy when the gales began to build.

Key Idea

The Great Lakes don’t behave like lakes; they behave like oceans with the safety margins squeezed out by shorter wave periods, tighter geography, and winter icing.

Behind the Fitzgerald’s grandeur sits a clear business story: shipping iron by water is far cheaper than rail or truck, and taconite pellets made mass movement even more efficient. From that premise, the industry evolved ships to the lock limits, optimized every load, and chipped away at safety reserves—legally and culturally. The book’s portrait of Northwestern Mutual’s investment and the docks’ practices shows how rational business moves can set up irrational risk once weather flips the script.

Taconite: the industrial enabler

Edward W. Davis’s process transformed low-grade ore into uniform pellets that pour like dry beans. Pellets don’t clump like raw ore; they slide, meter, and unload cleanly, enabling faster turnarounds. Think of taconite as the standardized container of mid-century iron (note: similar to how containerization revolutionized ocean shipping in the 1950s–60s). Faster cycles and predictable handling encouraged shipowners to stretch hulls, lighten structure via welding, and chase more tonnage per trip.

Freeboard for sale

The Fitzgerald’s dimensions—729 by 75 feet—existed to maximize cargo while clearing the Soo Locks by inches. Regulators eased freeboard standards between 1969 and 1973; the Fitz received a 39.25-inch draft reduction and was known to “find” a few more inches through crew practices: drain potable water tanks, warm decks to contract hot-loaded steel, or burn fuel to raise the stern at survey. One extra inch translated to roughly 120 long tons—real money across a season. On the Fitz’s last run, she carried about 26,112 long tons. That left roughly 11–15 feet of freeboard in heavy weather—technically compliant, practically unforgiving.

Design to the limits

Modular welding lightened the hull by more than a million pounds and sped construction. It also changed how stress traveled. Riveted ships distribute loads through thousands of overlapping joints; welded panels move stress across broader areas until a crack propagates. Crew remembered the Fitz as “the limberest boat,” intentional for long-lake bending but unkind to fatigue hot spots. Meanwhile, key safety compromises lurked in the plumbing: six large pumps sat aft, assuming water would run downhill into Hold #3. Absent mandated electronic hold sensors, a midship or port/starboard ingress could hide in the pellets, gather weight, and alter trim while the crew believed the system would clear it.

When cargo becomes a liability

Taconite’s virtue—uniform pellets with a clay binder—turns vice inside a flooded hold. Pellets absorb and trap water, swelling and hiding free liquid. Even functional bilges can’t chase interstitial water quickly. If hatch covers or clamps fail under repeated green-water blows (21 hatches x 68 clamps = 1,428 points of defense), ingress can outrun any pump. Combine that with icing weight and reduced freeboard and your safety buffer vanishes just as seas steepen.

The book doesn’t disparage efficient engineering; it insists you name the tradeoffs. On quiet days, these choices make you money. On worst days, they fix your fate. The Fitzgerald’s beauty lay in optimizing a system; its vulnerability lay in how thin the margins became when the lake reminded everyone who was in charge.

Key Idea

When cost and throughput dominate, inches of freeboard, pounds of steel, and minutes of loading become strategic variables—and, in a storm, compounding liabilities.

Ships are steel and systems, but the difference between coping and capsizing often sits with people: a captain’s judgment, an engineer’s quiet veto, and the unwritten norms that govern pride and help. The Fitzgerald’s crew culture—steady under Captain Ernest McSorley, cohesive in the galley and below deck—shows how professionalism shapes outcomes. It also shows what culture can’t overcome when the storm takes the wheel.

McSorley’s quiet authority

McSorley wasn’t a showman like Peter Pulcer before him. He led by competence—tight piloting, loyal crews, on-time deliveries. Wheelsman John Simmons followed him from ship to ship. In November 1975, the Fitzgerald sailed with men planning retirements, babies, and anniversaries—human stakes that amplify a captain’s burden. McSorley’s radio voice stayed level to the end, a professional mask that may have hidden urgency from peers who listened for tone as much as words.

Engineers: the throttle behind the throne

On steam turbine ships, engineers don’t just follow orders; they apportion power by opening and closing banks of nozzles, not by feathering a delicate throttle. The Anderson’s First Engineer, Harry Ashcroft, quietly reduced from 17 to 14 nozzles against his captain’s wishes, then lied to preserve the chain of command. His insubordination likely saved lives by reducing slamming and equipment stress. As engineer Barthuli put it: “The captain gets what the engineer gives him.” In hard seas, that autonomy can make the difference between finishing a passage and not finishing it at all.

The “silent-dude” code

Mariners on the lakes share a code: don’t embarrass another captain on open radio, and don’t advertise your ship’s weaknesses to competitors or company ears. That norm preserves dignity and jobs, but it mutes red flags in real time. On the night the Fitzgerald disappeared, Captain Jesse “Bernie” Cooper on the Anderson watched his radar in horror as the Fitz’s blip tracked over Six Fathom Shoal. He didn’t bark a course correction on Channel 16—few would. The culture slowed a blunt warning that, even if offered, might not have changed events under whiteout and failing instruments.

Rituals, morale, and rescue ethic

Crews bond in small things: Big Red Burgner’s galley, jukebox songs, shore bars from the President in Superior to the Municipal Lounge in Silver Bay, and the Westcott’s bum-boat mail with its own zip code (48222). Those ties make teams resilient when the lake gets ugly. They also underwrite the rescue ethic: when Group Soo asked for help, the Anderson and William Clay Ford turned back into punishing seas. Many “salties” declined; the code compelled lakers to risk it. Culture can’t calm the wind, but it can decide who goes looking when someone doesn’t answer.

Key Idea

Maritime culture is a safety system—engineers with real veto power, captains with professional restraint, and a rescue ethic that trades comfort for duty—until the same norms slow frank warnings and keep problems off the air.

Superior’s eastern approach demands precision. By Monday afternoon, November 10, 1975, the Fitzgerald approached the most intricate stretch of its run with the worst possible handicap: fading situational awareness. The book shows how unfamiliar terrain, imperfect charts, and failing instruments stripped away the tools even a great captain needs.

The northern gambit and its costs

McSorley’s shift north aimed to dodge the open-lake fetch. That choice routed the Fitz closer to Isle Royale and the Canadian shore—areas he transited far less often than the faster southern line. Inland seas reward habit; knowing by heart where Caribou Island lurks or where Six Fathom Shoal actually ends can be the difference between a clearance and a scrape when visibility collapses.

Old surveys, wrong scale

The 1973 U.S. Lake Survey Chart No. 9 leaned on Canadian data largely from 1916–1919. Later surveys pushed the shoal’s known limits farther east than the chart suggested. In whiteouts, you switch to larger-scale charts late or early at your peril; one wrong sheet can shift your mental picture by miles. The NTSB later concluded the chart did not adequately depict Six Fathom’s reach. Without GPS (decades away), even a small charting mismatch in a snow squall becomes consequential.

When radars and beacons go dark

At 4:10 p.m., McSorley reported both short- and long-range radars were out. The Whitefish Point radio beacon and lighthouse then flickered in and out as the Coast Guard struggled with remote systems. A Swedish captain (Avafors) reported seeing the light; moments later, it failed again. Stripped of radar returns and electronic bearings, you steer by dead reckoning and scant landmarks—on a night when snow stitched air to water and distance to guesswork.

Warnings that go unsaid

The Anderson’s radar placed the Fitz near (or over) Six Fathom Shoal. Captain Cooper didn’t issue a direct course order; few captains would on a party-line channel. Professional courtesy, pride, and uncertainty about his own returns constrained him. Alone, radar failure is survivable. Alone, chart imperfections are survivable. Layer them with a whiteout and a culture of radio restraint, and you get a bridge crew flying blind into a maze with rising wind at their back.

You can plan for bad weather. You can’t plan to lose your eyes just as the maze tightens. That’s what the Fitzgerald faced in the hours before it disappeared from the Anderson’s screen for good.

Key Idea

Navigation fails by subtraction: a slightly wrong chart, a dead radar, a dark beacon, and a whiteout will erase even an expert captain’s margin.

Meteorology didn’t just roughen the lake; it choreographed a trap. Two systems—a southwestern low hauling warm, wet air and an Alberta Clipper driving an arctic blast—collided in a way forecasters and mariners misread in real time. The worst winds hugged Superior’s southern shore and raced east toward Whitefish Bay, arriving just as the Fitzgerald did.

Anatomy of the collision

As the southwestern system climbed from the desert Southwest, it gathered heat and moisture. The clipper dove southeast with cold, dry air. Where they met over Superior, pressure gradients steepened and winds accelerated—a classic recipe for explosive cyclogenesis in a confined basin (note: analogous to landfalling hurricane interactions that tighten wind fields). Oceanographer David Schwab later modeled how a pocket of the southwestern low hugged the southern shore and sprinted for Whitefish Bay—the precise path the Fitzgerald’s route would intersect.

Forecast lag and decision bias

Early National Weather Service bulletins called it a typical November blow, then upgraded to a gale, then a storm—always a step behind the lake. Captains like McSorley balanced those bulletins with observations and experience. You see a classic bias: trust in seasonally familiar patterns (and schedules) makes you slow to overweight an outlier. By the time the storm warning went up, winds had already exceeded 58 mph and were gusting higher.

Rogue waves by the numbers

Significant wave heights along the southern shore reached 15–25 feet; that implies occasional 40–60-foot rogues. With Superior’s short periods, you don’t “see it coming” as a graceful wall; you get a violent, steep-faced surprise that can launch the bow, ventilate a propeller, and slam the midships into a trough. The book recounts eyewitnesses in Marquette seeing green water over Picnic Rock (about 16 feet high), suggesting near-shore waves of 25 feet or more. Offshore, where fetch and wind aligned, it was worse.

The timing penalty of prudence

McSorley’s shift north reduced open-lake exposure but delayed arrival at Whitefish Bay—the storm’s bullseye. His later “I’m checking down” cut speed to nurse topside damage and reduce pounding. Sensible decisions, both. Yet each minute of lower speed gave the converging lows time to intensify and outpace him. The result: the Fitzgerald entered the eastern choke point as the storm peaked, navigational aids failed, and any flooding (from vents, hatches, or a shoal strike) compounded. That’s how smart seamanship, filtered through bad luck and unusual meteorology, can still leave you in the worst place at the worst time.

Key Idea

Weather can invert good choices: a cautious route and a sensible slowdown became a timing trap when two storms merged along the Fitzgerald’s path.

The book resists a neat culprit. Instead, it assembles clues from radio calls, debris, sonar, and dives to outline overlapping failure paths. What emerges is a compressed, brutal end: structures stressed to the limit, water where it shouldn’t be, and a final sequence too fast for a Mayday.

Early signals: damage and list

At 3:30 p.m., McSorley reported “topside damage”—a fence rail laid down, two vents lost or damaged—and “a list.” Torn fence rails suggest violent flexing or a slam; missing vent covers create a pathway for sustained ingress into ballast tanks. A list—especially persistent—means weight went somewhere it shouldn’t, whether uneven icing, tank flooding, or water trapped in taconite.

Ingress paths: small holes, big consequences

Possible avenues multiplied under pounding seas: damaged vents, a leaky or blown hatch corner, a stray open access, or worst of all, a hull breach if the ship scraped bedrock at Six Fathom Shoal. With 21 hatches and 1,428 clamps, one weak corner under repeated blows can open a firehose into a hold. Once inside, taconite absorbs water, hides it, and grows heavier—overwhelming pumps designed for bilge water, not a cargo sponge. The Fitz’s aft-located pumps assumed water would run toward them; trapped amidships or to port/starboard, it could sit, grow, and change trim.

Structure at the limits

Short-period seas and any added weight drive stress cycles through a welded hull that crew already called “limber.” If a rogue sequence lifted bow and stern while the midships sagged—especially with a flooded or softened hold—the bending moment could exceed fatigue thresholds. The Bradley and Morrell taught the lakes that long freighters can part suddenly under hog-sag extremes. In the Fitz’s case, CURV footage later showed a two-piece wreck separated by roughly 170 feet: the stern upside down, the bow upright, debris in between. Lifeboats were found crushed in their davits or mangled—evidence of violence, not organized launch.

Last human traces

A forward winch lay with 120 feet of cable paid out, as if crew had tried to lash the deck—an age-old move to “stitch” a working crack. A pilothouse door was found latched open, odd in such weather unless someone was supervising deck work. DeepQuest video in 1994 caught at least one body in a lifejacket, a rare glimpse that someone tried to prepare—yet no time remained for an abandon-ship order. McSorley’s final radio words at 7:10 p.m.—“We are holding our own”—came minutes before the Anderson lost the Fitzgerald’s radar blip altogether.

Competing scenarios, one pattern

Whether you favor a shoal strike, hatch failure, vent-driven flooding, or rogue-wave structural overload, the shape of the end is the same: progressive ingress that changed trim and stiffness, short-period seas that amplified bending, and a final structural failure or buoyancy loss so rapid that radios, rafts, and orders became moot. Systemic margins were too thin to convert awareness into survival.

Key Idea

Disasters rarely hinge on one thing; they congeal from many small vulnerabilities aligned by bad luck into a brief, lethal window.

The night the Fitzgerald vanished, the Coast Guard’s Group Soo hesitated, radios hopped channels, and precious minutes drained away—longer than anyone could survive in Superior’s November water. Even so, captains honored the code: the Anderson turned back into the teeth of the storm, and the William Clay Ford joined the search. What followed—recovered lifeboats, scattered debris, silence—gave families a loss without bodies and a region a legend it never wanted.

Search under fire

Captain Cooper’s calls on Channel 16 got bounced to Channel 12, adding ~15 minutes. In that time, a person in Superior’s frigid waters would succumb to hypothermia. Ten vessels ultimately searched; “salties” declined; lakers went anyway. The evidence they found argued for speed and force, not a slow dying: a lifeboat crushed flat, another twisted with davits indicating it hadn’t been launched.

Song and public memory

Gordon Lightfoot wove AP clippings, Newsweek lines, and maritime details into “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” His first, raw studio take became the single and a national elegy. As facts clarified, he updated lyrics (notably about hatch failure), signaling a rare artist’s respect for accuracy. For millions, the ballad became the history—anchoring the event in culture as well as in maritime lore.

Families, closure, and advocacy

Without bodies, families improvised grief. Some fought Columbia for more humane settlements; others, like Ruth Hudson, pressed to raise the ship’s bell. In 1995, divers recovered it; in 1999, authorities consecrated the wreck as a gravesite, ending casual dives. Personal stories—Cindy Reynolds raising baby Heather Lee alone, cadet David Weiss’s high-school romance suddenly orphaned—reveal how a public tragedy fractures private timelines.

Reforms that stuck

The most consequential legacy is quiet: better forecasts and modeling, sturdier electronics and redundant radars, improved communication protocols, and a cultural reset that rewards caution over marginal speed. The industry internalized lessons from earlier wrecks—the Bradley, Morrell, and Cedarville—and from the Fitz itself. The proof lives in the record: in the half-century since November 1975, no commercial ship has been lost on the Great Lakes. That safety dividend owes much to a tragedy that refused to fade into folklore alone.

The book closes where it began: with people and choices. It asks you to see beyond a ballad’s last tolling bell to the everyday decisions—design margins, loading habits, radio etiquette—that either buffer bad luck or amplify it. On the night the gales of November came early, too many little things leaned the wrong way.

Key Idea

Lasting safety comes when hard-won lessons become habits—better tools, stricter margins, and a culture that treats prudence as professionalism, not timidity.