DryDock Productions
The Journey is the Reward
Did you ever wonder what it would feel like to be aboard a ship during a challenging storm?
Our radio play “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” puts you in the shoes of a crewman. You’ll hear their actual dialogue and get a sense of the danger they faced.
A Radio Play by Hal Barnes
What actually happened to the Fits? There are several theories, each one has is’s strengths and weaknesses.
Fortunately, the William Clay Ford, at anchor in Whitefish Bay, recorded the last hour or so of the radio transmissions from that evening,
This video is a good presentation of the many theories about the cause of the sinking,
The large cargo vessels that roamed the five Great Lakes were known as lakers, and the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was, at the time, the biggest ever built. It was constructed as a “maximum sized” bulk carrier and spanned 729 feet—the first laker to reach that length. It sat 39 feet high with a width of 75 feet, and weighed more than 13,000 tons without cargo. It was christened on June 8, 1958, and made its first voyage on September 24 the same year.
Read more at Mental Floss.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was a hit song composed and written by Gordon Lightfoot in 1976.
It tells the story of the sinking of the bulk carrier, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.
The song was a number 1 hit in Lightfoot’s native Canada and reached number 1 in Cashbox in the U.S. after that.
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