LAKE SUPERIOR--
Graveyard of the Great Lakes

Stand at the end of this observation deck, look to the North-northwest and 17 miles out in 535 feet of water you will be looking across the site of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

This Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point notes, "Deceivingly beautiful, Lake Superior's unrelenting fury has earned the reputation of being the most treacherous of the Great Lakes".

All 29 crew members of the Fitzgerald lost their lives on that November 10, 1975 in the violence of one of Superior's boiling storms.  They are memorialized here along with the 30,000 other men, women and children lost to shipwreck on the Great Lakes.

The museum grounds also contain the Whitefish Point Light Station, built in 1849 (right).  It has "...illuminated these dangerous waters for mariners continuously since."

Another terrific feature of the museum is the beautifully restored Surfboat House which contains an oar-propelled life-saving boat of its day (below) and a beach wagon containing all the then modern apparatus to rescue folks stranded on a ship stuck in the near, off-shore shallows.

The wagon featured a small, brass cannon which could fire a projectile, with a messenger line attached, across the top of the vessel in distress where able bodied survivors could use the delivered line to pull an even heavier line across the open water and secure it.

A breeches-buoy then could travel back and forth from the ship to shore, hauling one person at a time to safety.  They would be secured in the buoy, dangling from the heavy line with a pulley as the buoy was hauled back and forth--sometimes dipping the survivor into a crashing wave depending on the mood of the surf.

More than 240 shipwrecks are known to have happened in Whitefish Bay and the approach waters of Lake Superior; in that area known as "The Graveyard of the Great Lakes".