Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

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Great Lakes have claimed so many ships, deadliest being the Lady Elgin with a loss of approximately 300 lives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Lady_Elgin).

The huge waves that brought down Edmund Fitzgerald are thought to be caused by the mythical Gales of November phenomenon on Lake Superior (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/11/10/lake-superiors-gale...), which is due to cold Arctic air from north colliding with very warm air from the Gulf of Mexico (we had 70s in Chicago this week!).

From the MPRNews article:

"John Swenson, a professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth who grew up on Lake Superior, has looked at records of the biggest storms over the past 30 years.

'I find that the average storm, so in terms of time of the year, actually falls on about Nov. 10. So long story short, we get a storm like this, you know, on average on Nov. 10.' "

> deadliest being the Lady Elgin with a loss of approximately 300 lives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Lady_Elgin).

The wikipedia page isn't quite clear on the matter:

> Professor Mason and Lieutenant Bartlett asserted that a principal cause of the collision was the lack of a $15 lantern on the Augusta

> The judgement was based on a law that not only gave sail the right of way over steam, but did not require sailing vessels to carry running lights.

It didn't matter that the Augusta was a sailing ship, it still had the right of way over the Lady Elgin, and it was the duty of the Lady Elgin to alter course to avoid the collision. But because the Augusta was a sailing ship it didn't need adequate lighting, so the Lady Elgin didn't see it until it was too late.

By the way, the law [1] right now still gives sailing vessels right of way over motor vessels. The location of the wreck, just offshore from Chicago, 700+ miles from the nearest ocean, is subject to the international treaty governing the avoidance of collisions at sea.

[1] https://www.imo.org/en/About/Conventions/Pages/COLREG.aspx

> Many of these ships were never found, so the exact number of shipwrecks in the Lakes is unknown; the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum approximates 6,000 ships and 30,000 lives lost, while historian and mariner Mark Thompson has estimated that the total number of wrecks is likely more than 25,000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shipwrecks_in_the_Grea...

This year fit the pattern quite well. I heard on the radio that there were 20' waves on Superior the other day.

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