#1687 The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, 50 Years Later

Clay joins author John U. Bacon of Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose book, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, takes a new look at the sinking of the Fitzgerald on November 10, 1975. Four years in the making, Bacon's research unearthed new material on the catastrophe, in which all 29 crew members (all men) perished when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Was there crew error or hubris in Captain Ernest McSorley? Was the great 729-foot ship structurally unsound? Or was it just a perfect storm? The winds rose to 100 miles per hour that day, and the waves were sometimes 60 feet or more high. The Fitzgerald settled on the bottom of Lake Superior more than 500 feet below the surface. It has been visited several times since, but the Canadian government, whose territorial waters the incident occurred in, severely restricts visitation because it regards it as a gravesite. This episode was recorded on November 24, 2025.