Wreck of the DANIEL J MORRELL

On this day in 1966, the ore carrier the Daniel J Morrell was making her final run of the season on Lake Huron.  She was traveling with a sister ship, the Edward Townsend.  Both were very old ships; they were built in 1906, six years before the Titanic, and had the same problem with the steel.  The Great Lakes are very cold and the steel made during the early part of the 20th Century got very brittle in cold water.  In fact, many sailors who had been on her said the Morrell was a rust bucket.  She had been mothballed and only called back into service earlier that year.  
      During the trip on November 26th 1966, a late-autumn storm struck Lake Huron and battered the Morrell and the Townsend.  Watchman Dennis Hale recalls that a loud bang woke him up and knocked the books off his shelf.  The Morrell had been buffeted so badly by the storm that she broke in two on the surface.  Hale grabbed a life jacket and a pea coat and managed to get to a life raft with several other crewmates.  The Morrell's bow sank while her stern continued on for five miles before sinking.  Hale's crewmates gradually succumbed to hypothermia and he huddled under their bodies in order to keep warm.  During his time on the raft, he had an strange experience in which an old man told not to eat the ice chips from his pea coat.  Hale was on the life raft for forty hours before being rescued.  He later found out that he alone had survived the sinking.  He never spoke of the incident for twenty years.  He wrote a book a few years ago called Sole Survivor, about his ordeal on Lake Huron that night.  
       After the Morrell sank, there was a crack found in the hull of the Edward Townsend.  This crack was enough to deem her unseaworthy and she was sold for scrap in Europe.  While she was being towed across the Atlantic, however, the Townsend broke and sank near the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.  

Wreck Of The CARL D. BRADLEY

This is one of the most famous Great Lakes shipwrecks of recent history.  The Carl D. Bradley was an ore carrier, which means she transported iron ore from one place to another.  She had already been in service on the lakes for thirty-one years at the time of her final voyage in 1958.

The Great Lakes are prone to massive violent storms in late autumn.  These produce waves that can be up forty feet high.  On the night November 18, the Bradley ran into one such storm on Lake Michigan.  She broke in two on the surface and went down with thirty-three of her crewman.  Only two men survived to tell the tale; First Mate Elmer Fleming (aged froty-three at the time), and Deck Watchman Frank Mayes (aged 26 at the time).  They had escaped with two other crewmen in a life raft, but the latter two died of exposure to the elements.  Fleming and Mayes held on and later rescued by the Christian Sartori, a German cargo vessel that witnessed the Bradley's sinking.  

What makes the story of this wreck a very gut-wrenching one is the fact most of the crewmen on board (a total of 23) were from Rogers City, a small town in Northern Michigan.  The entire town was devastated by the loss of their men on the lake.  As a tribute to the families of the victims, divers down to wreck and retrieved the bell in 2008.  A memorial service was held in City hall and the bell tolled to commemorate the crew.  

Frank Mayes is the only one of the two survivors left.  Elmer Fleming died about twelve years after the sinking. 

SAND MERCHANT Wreck: A Case of Colossal Foolishness

I read Dwight Boyer's book Ships and Men of the Great Lakes.  This book had a story about a sand-sucker ship called the Sand Merchant.  In her heyday she worked on Lake Erie, sucking sand from the lake bottom to be used in making pavement for roads.  

However, on this day is 1936, First Mate Bernie Drinkwater had invited his wife along to take a trip.  This was of course against the rules.  However, this rule was often overlooked by captains. 
Well, sometime during the evening, the Sand Merchant began to list to port.  Whether it was a leak in her ballast tanks or a shifting of her cargo is not known.  Drinkwater roused the other sailors to help prepare the lifeboats but he himself went to calm his wife instead doing his duties.  As a result, they and seventeen others went down with the ship. 

This article includes the account from Dwight Boyer's book and can explain the incident better than I can.

Wreck of the EDMUND FITZGERALD

This song by Gordon Lightfoot tells the story of the 1975 sinking of the ore carrier ship, the Edmund Fitzgerald.  

The Great Lakes are often battered by storms in late autumn, especially in November.  Lakes Superior, Michigan, and Huron tend to get the worst of these gales, which involve hurricane-force winds, 40-60 ft. high waves, and freezing rain and/or snow.

On November 10th, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald  was making her last voyage of the season on Lake Superior.  During the night, she sailed into a late-autumn storm.  Despite being equipped with the best state-of-the-art technology, she still went down with all hands on board.  She lies in two pieces at the bottom of the lake; her stern section is upside down.