tomndebb, complicating matters, the US charts didn’t show the shoals, while the canadian charts did. IIRC.
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I don’t have a lot to add to this thread, since others have already pointed out most of the theories around the sinking.
I do, however, live approximately 1 mile from Lake Superior, and have the pleasure of looking at it just about every day. It’s a hell of a lake. We’ve recently taken up sea kayaking, and although both me and Mr. Athena love it, we both have contemplated giving it up because Lake Superior can be just so damn scary. We’re always looking out at the waves trying to figure out if it’s safe to go out or not, and a lot of times I look at it and wonder why I do go out on it. It sank the bloody Edmund Fitzgerald! For those of you who’ve never seen an ore boat, I’m here to tell you, they’re HUGE. I run/bike by the ore dock a lot, and the boats that come in there are truly staggering.
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Athena, wow, I really have to review my geography. Colorado is within 1 mile of Lake Superior? Holy Moly!
Wasn’t there something called a Witch Wave or something like that-that basically swamped boats?
I cannot speak from experience, but perhaps I can contribute from other sources. My info comes from Dave Hunt, Bob Dvorak, and Bob Fisher, three people who conducted a tour of a similar boat, the Edward L. Ryerson, earlier this year.
Dave Hunt served on the Ryerson, and is a former chief engineer from the Wilfred Sykes, still plying the Great Lakes. Hunt is the source of the “several hours” time to dog the hatches, and the quote about not securing all of them unless conditions warrant. He also said, as you did, that no captain would have taken a chance in a storm, so the Fitzgerald theory about a hatch taking on water doesn’t hold water with him.
The Ryerson is a 730-ft ore carrier, built in the 1960’s for Inland Steel; still afloat, but not in use. This compares to the Fitzgerald, built 1958 and 729 ft. If they are similar in other ways, they would have 15 or more hatch covers, not 5, so this would triple the securing time or the crew needed. (The Sykes has 18 hatch covers.)
You can see, in this pic of the Ryerson, what the dogs look like and get an idea of how many had to be hand-tightened.
This pic shows Dave Hunt talking about the dogs, and will give you an idea of the scale.
This pic shows the entire cargo length of the boat. I can count 14-16 hatch covers.
Also remember that if there was insufficient warning, the dog tightening would have to be done in severly adverse conditions. If you don’t think that the deck is a dangerous place to be under storm conditions, consider that on the Ryerson, there are two covered tunnels the length of the ship that the captain would order the crew to use when things got rough. According to Dave Hunt, one 1/2 inch thick glass porthole, above the main deck level, shattered when a wave hit it one time. A man standing on the deck wouldn’t have a chance without a lifeline.
Here’s a picture of Lake Michigan taken as I wrote this post, with 13-foot waves. The Fitz was sailing in much bigger ones.
(bolding mine)
Those back-enders never did know what happened on deck. (Of course, my knowledge of engine room procedures is pretty scant.) 
I did not say five hatches, but five holds–at four hatches to a hold, giving 20 hatches. (On some ships, the fifth hold was a bit longer giving 21 hatches, but it does not look as though this was true for the Fitz.)
Here is a jpeg of the Edmund Fitzgerald (probably upbound on the Detroit River).
The John Sherwin and the Charles M. Beeghly* that I sailed aboard were built on the same hull design as the Fitz. The Ryerson (aka the Spaceship) was similar, but was built as a “show” boat and had some odd features.
Here is a shot of the hatches on the Fitz–oddly, enough with most of them undogged. (I suspect by the people in the photo that this was a “tour” day in a nice, quiet, summer docking.)
The dogs were in two pieces: a C-clamp and a “strap” that connected it to the coaming. The hatch wrench was a lever with a U-shaped attachment at the business end that was just wide enough to place the two tines of the lever around the “strap” where the “strap” had two pegs jutting out to each side. To fasten a dog, we swung the C-clamp up onto the coaming, then stuck the tines of the hatch wrench into the area defined by the pegs and leaned down, levering the “strap” under the lip of the coaming and tightening the C-clamp in place. (The principle was very much like the clasp on a lunchbox or toolbox.)
It took less than 1 1/2 seconds to dog each clamp. There were six dogs at each end and 20 or 24 clamps on the long sides. 60 clamps per hatch by 20 hatches per ship at 2 seconds per dog is 2400 seconds/40 minutes, divided by 2 men gets us back to the 20 minutes I had remembered. (More men meant shorter elapsed time.) Looking at the Ryerson photos, I see that they had a lot larger hatches and more clamps, (they seem to be 12 by 28 which, for 21 hatches would take one man 56 minutes–probably a bit longer as his back started to hurt, but, then, they would not have only one man working on them.)
*The Beeghly had been lengthened from 710 feet to 806 feet the year I sailed, but it had not been converted to a self-unloader at that time.
Tom, What were you sailing as, ordinary seaman?
Yup. Paid my way through the last couple of years of college. (I was the entire deckhand complement one week when a couple of guys got liquored up and jumped ship and the following year I was deckwatch for a week when the A.B. deckwatch quit to join the Army (to avoid being keelhauled).
I looked the waves up-they were called the “Three Sisters”
From the site I linked to before:
And here is a line by line explanation of the song:
http://home.europa.com/~random7/fitz.htm
No, don’t review geography, review SD threads from June and July. I picked up and moved from Colorado to da UP back then… I’m back in my hometown now, and am MUCH happier!
Tomndebb, on this kind of boat, is one “hold” covered by 4 hatches? Then I would assume that if the cargo shifted seriously, the pellets still couldn’t roll past the dividing partition between the holds, right? The reason I ask is this quote, from the link given above by Guinastasia:
That statement seems to suggest that all the load at the back went to the front of the whole boat, not just each hold’s cargo shifted to front of the same hold only.
Tho even a hold-by-hold shift, if it happened all at once, might be pretty darn damaging, I guess.
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Hi Athena. Even though I am from Northern Ontario, growing up in the Soo gave me a great opportunity to get to know alot of yoopers… I know many who moved away from there (and from the Soo and area on the Ontario side) and have moved back as the geography is constantly calling you home. People in the mountains or on the ocean or anywhere else on the planet can “claim” to have the most beautiful spot in which to live, but without seeing the wildness, and rugged beauty of the Canadian Shield as the waves fast and furious from Superior crash upon the shore, well, then you don’t have a proper context in which to base your decision. 
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Anyway, I think everyone here has pretty much gotten the basics covered. The aforementioned cottage in my last post (waaay up top) is actually on the top of a 20 foot cliff overlooking the bay. In October and November, waves have ben known to wipe out the beach below and actually crash over the top of the cliff. Scary, exhilerating stuff to watch. And these waves would hit every 5 - 10 seconds. I’m not sure that the oceans match the frequency of pounding waves that Superior can. Those babies are so close together.
I love da UP, but I’ll stick with central Lake Michigan. At least I can swim in it about 4 months of the year!
Yeah, I would think that you could get a little bit of “down by the bow” with shifting the ore foreward, but no ore should have left its own hold. (The hold dividers are of the same construction as the hull–they’re designed to contain the cargo.)
I didn’t challenge that statement because it probably would not take much “down by the bow” to affect the way the ship handled in the heavy seas, but if the ore is shifting from one hold to the next, your structure is already seriously compromised. The only opening between the holds are a pair of inspection hatches high in the bulkheads. At 26,000 tons, the ore should not have come within six feet of the bottom of those hatches (you’d have to stand the boat on its bow for a half hour to get the ore to drain through), so ore moving from one hold to the next means that the hold’s bulkhead has been breached.