The Fitzgerald route

9 November 1975

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin on the afternoon of 9 November 1975, loaded with taconite pellets and bound for Zug Island near Detroit. She sailed out through the Superior entry and across Lake Superior into a November gale. On the evening of 10 November she sank in eastern Lake Superior, about seventeen miles north-northwest of Whitefish Point, with all twenty-nine aboard. She was a few hours short of the shelter of Whitefish Bay, and she never reached the Soo.

That run — out of the Duluth–Superior harbour, across the lake, down through the Soo — is not a historical route. Duluth–Superior is the largest port on the lakes by tonnage, and the archive shows boats making the run most days of the season. This page is the record of who makes it now.