By Michael Bennett
Local Journalism Initiative
The Ridgetown Independent
Jane Baldwin-Marvell and her teammates eerily experienced the fury of a Great Lakes storm last month while they were honouring the 29 mariners who perished when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank 50 years ago.
The Ridgetown woman and her teammates – Lisa Pickering of Cobourg, Karen Kreusel of Dearborn, Mich. and Noah Heilbrun of Bend, Ore. – were nearing the end of their Lexington-to-Port Huron leg of the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim on the night of Aug. 23.
They were the 15th of the 17 four-person teams who swam the route the ill-fated freighter was supposed to complete before it sank in hurricane-force winds from a violent storm on Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975.
The Edmund Fitzgerald was carrying 26,000 tons of taconite pellets from Superior, Wis., bound for the steel plants in Detroit when it sank 17 miles from Whitefish Bay.
“I vaguely remember it as a child, hearing about it on the news,” Baldwin-Marvell said of her memory of the Fitzgerald’s sinking as she was living in Toronto at the time.
She moved to Ridgetown 20 years ago
The Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim began in late July at the site of the ship’s sinking and ended on Aug. 27, at the Belle Isle Yacht Club as the last of the 17 teams completed the final stage of the 411 miles of the ship’s intended journey.
Each participant carried taconite pellets in their swimming gear, symbolic of the delivering the Fitzgerald’s cargo.
Baldwin-Marvell’s team began their 19-mile leg of the swim at Lexington Beach around 7 a.m., as they swam about a half-kilometre out on Lake Huron from the shoreline.
The swimmers took turns spending 30 minutes in the water followed by 90 minutes on the support boat Sea Delight in the relay-style event.
“It was a long day, we had to swim against the current and through two- and three-foot white caps,” said Baldwin-Marvell, an elementary school teacher who moved to Ridgetown 20 years ago.
She was nearing the end of her final shift, with the Bluewater Bridge in the distance, when she noticed Jim’ The Shark’ Dreyer, the event organizer, frantically calling for her to get out of the water.
“I was about 20 minutes into my seventh swim, I was noticing the pretty sunset and how the sky was a lovely colour, but I didn’t realize that a storm was sneaking up behind us,” Baldwin-Marvell said.
Baldwin-Marvell said a couple of minutes after she got out of the water, they were engulfed by a severe storm with heavy rain, lightning, fierce winds and high waves.
The Sea Delight sheltered in place but at one point its anchor lifted, causing the boat to drift eastward towards the shipping lanes.
“We almost got blown into the shipping lanes; we were right on the edge and had a freighter bearing down on us,” Baldwin-Marvell said.
The Sea Delight crew was able to stabilize the support boat and ride out the rest of the storm.
“We thought it would blow over, but we were stopped for over two hours,” Baldwin-Marvell said.
She said her teammates and crew couldn’t help but think about the Edmund Fitzgerald and Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” song as they rode out the storm.
“‘Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the waves turn the minutes to hours,’” Baldwin-Marvell said, reciting a line from Lightfoot’s song. “That’s what I was feeling.”
Once the storm subsided, the team opted to complete their stage in the dark rather than stop and finish in the morning.
Baldwin-Marvell completed her final 10 minutes before a teammate swam the final 30-minute shift as they reached their destination at the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, near the Bluewater Bridge, around 11 p.m. – about three hours later than expected.
When they got to the beach, the swimmers and crew held a ceremony to honour Sandy Stassen, a Michigan resident who was supposed to be on the team but tragically died on June 9.
Kreusel, Stassen’s replacement, carried her ashes in her visibility buoy, which was scattered into the lake after the ceremony, as per her family’s request.
“It was a moving moment,” Baldwin-Marvell said, as she had never met Stassen but knew her by name from the event planning.
The memorial swim ended two days later as Stage 16 went from Port Huron to Algonac and Stage 17 from Algonac to Belle Isle.
Baldwin-Marvell and most of the 68 swimmers and crew attended a special service on Aug. 28, at the Maritime Church of Detroit – depicted as the “musty old hall” in Lightfoot’s song.
Members of the memorial swim team read the names of the 29 men on the freighter, each followed by the ringing of a bell – just as it happened 50 years ago when the “church bell chimed ’til it rang 29 times for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald,’” in Lightfoot’s song.
The bell rang a 30th time in memory of the 30,000 mariners who have lost their lives on the Great Lakes.
“It was very poignant, very beautifully done,” Baldwin-Marvell said of the service.
For Baldwin-Marvell and the other memorial swim participants, the church service was the first opportunity to meet members of the other 16 teams and create friendships that will last a lifetime.
Baldwin-Marvell said she will forever cherish the bond with her teammates.
“I met three amazing swimmers who inspired me to keep training, keep swimming and to go on and find new adventures,” she said.
Taking part in the memorial swim was also a personal victory for Baldwin-Marvell who underwent double-hip replacement surgery five years ago.
