The SS Edmund Fitzgerald: Featuring Michigan Shipwreck Explorer, Ric Mixter

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a tanker that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10th, 1975. It was carrying 29 crewmen and 26,000 tons of taconite pellets. According to Mr. Mixter, the storm that evening wasn't the worst to hit the Great Lakes, but the ‘Fitz’ took on seven different storms that year and Captain McSorley overestimated the reliability of his ship, thinking it could withstand anything. Unfortunately, on that fateful night, the tanker sank so quickly that not one mayday single was sounded; it took all 29 crewmen with it. Mysteriously, not a single body was found.
In this incredible interview, Ric talks about the Edmund Fitzgerald, recalling his dive to the famous wreck, and how he and his crew are the only explorers to have spotted and documented a body found with the wreck.

Thank you for joining me! Please consider subscribing or writing a review. New episodes are uploaded biweekly.

News Report about the discovery: Edmund Fitzgerald Crewman Discovered
Ric Mixter's new book can be found by following the link below...
Tattletale Sounds — Lake Fury

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.BrianneTurczynski.com or www.LovingTheImperfect.com

#podcast #interviews #edmundfitzgerald #shipwreck #ricmixter #michigan #michiganshipwrecks #michiganhistory #spirituality #history #prayer #love #ministry #interviews #christianity #contemplative #meditation #Bible #Biblereading #religion #Biblestudy #christianmystic #mysticism

For more information about me and my work, please visit www.brianneturczynski.com or www.lovingtheimperfect.com

Transcript

Intro:

Welcome to Loving the Imperfect Podcast, a show for seekers of deeper contemplation. I'm Brianne Turczynski.  For 10 years, I've been studying offerings from holy teachers and holy texts. I'm a journalist who has listened to the stories of many people throughout the years, and I continue to be captivated by the stories of how God nudges and directs us, either by closing doors or opening them.  So, join me as we listen to these extraordinary stories and become witnesses to the truth of Love.

Welcome to Loving the Imperfect. Today, I want to share with you an interview I did a few years ago with Michigan shipwreck explorer, Ric Mixter. I conducted this interview in the spring of 2021. I was teaching a middle school English class at the time, and I wanted to bring an interesting lesson, something that incorporated free writing with history.

 Ric was amazing and allowed me to interview him about his dive to the Edmund Fitzgerald, a tanker that sank in Lake Superior during a storm on November 10th, 1975. It was carrying 29 crewmen and 26,000 tons of taconite which is processed iron ore. Captain McSorley never sent out a mayday signal at all. The ship went down very quickly, nobody really knows exactly how. They have their theories, but they don't know exactly how it went down.  No bodies were found until Ric Mixter, and the people that he was with found a body, and he's going to tell us that story today.

Please consider purchasing a copy of his book It's called Tattletale Sounds: The Edmund Fitzgerald investigations…

You can find it on www.lakefury. com and I'll put a link to it in the information to this show. I have gone back to this interview many times, even trying to publish the transcript in university journals. So, with Ric's permission, I'm publishing this interview here on Loving the Imperfect. Ric, if you're listening, thank you so much for the opportunity to share this story one more time with my listeners 

Here's the interview:

 Brianne: So how did you get in Michigan shipwrecks in particular? 
 
 Ric: I had a high school friend who was a scuba diver, but I grew up in a trailer in the upper peninsula.  Very [impoverished] area, I didn't think I could ever dive.

So, I kind of put it off from my mind. I lived through the storm when the Fitzgerald went down in ’75. It wasn't the worst storm to hit the U.P. at all. In fact, it was small compared to the blizzard of ‘78 and several other ones where we literally had to dig our trailer out to get out. So, I've always been interested, but then when I became a news journalist, I started covering different stories and, lo and behold, one huge shipwreck came into Bay City, Michigan in 1990 called the Jupiter. It was a tanker full of three million gallons of gas. Another boat went by, and it broke away from the dock, and a spark made it explode. We ran down there for two nights and watched this thing literally blowing up. It killed one of the crewmen who drowned trying to get off. 
 
I was very enthralled about this being the largest of the tankers ever lost on the Great Lakes. And how I was kind of a part of it. So, after that, I started to investigate shipwrecks. I walked the deck of that ship before it was scrapped.

And I thought, boy, this is just something I'd like to learn more about. The biggest shipwrecks. And of course, Fitzgerald fit into that. I started looking for interviews, and that was what I did best was television interviews. So, I started finding the survivors from 1913, 1940, the Carl Bradley, the Daniel J. Murrell, and of course there were no survivors from the Fitzgerald, but I thought, I'm going to start interviewing all the people who went out to rescue them and do that. So, I built this great library of things. I made a documentary on the 1913 storm and a lot of people saw it in Saginaw. And all of a sudden, the guy called up and said, “I want to dive the Fitzgerald”.

And we thought it was a joke. We thought, well, you know, good luck with that. But he took all the money that he was supposed to build his wife's dream home, $70,000, and rented a submarine and called us up and wanted us to pay. And, you know, here's how much I want. And I said, “listen, you know, TV 12 has been there twice, our station, which is competition with 12, is not going to be second banana and go out there and pay $20,000.  So, he tried to shop it around and finally came back and said, “Can we trade?” And we would trade all of our services. I would produce a video for him, and we would go, essentially for free, we would buy our own meals and our own expenses.

And we went down there, and it would have been just like any other dive to a shipwreck, except I was inside of a submarine, where when you go down, you don't get as cold as you normally do when you're wearing a wetsuit or especially a dry suit in the ice or Lake Superior, which can be at the bottom near 33 degrees. It's practically iced down there and it's very difficult to maneuver.  So, for me it was just getting into the submarine and going down there and seeing it and trying to get the best image that we could and that's what my job was. 
 
Brianne: Wow. What did you see down there, was there anything that surprised you, anything that you were expecting? 

Ric: Yeah, everything's every second in the submarine surprised me, you know, from going to where it became completely dark, which I'd never been past 200 ft. You know, the deepest I've ever dived is 165 and to get down that deep and not have the narcosis and have clear mindedness where I'm not out of my head with nitrogen the way you would be if you were just scuba diving, to get into the bottom where it looks like a moonscape. It's not sand on the bottom of Superior there. It's a silt and it's all bumpy and lumpy like the moon would be. And then every once in a while, you'd see a little fish take off and it would leave a little cloud where it took off and it would skid across the bottom. And then we were lost for probably half an hour trying to find the wreck.
 
 And then boom, we were right over the first hatch. Where that's, you know, where the big wave had collapsed in. The first hatch folded in by the weight of this wave that came down, and so I was immediately not only filming but trying to think through my head, you know what we should try to get while we're down there and then the submarine went around, all the way around the pilot house twice, and then went to the top of the mass so we could see the radars and get pictures of those and then we decided we asked if we could have extra time. We'd already used up an hour, and they said, yeah, if you want to see the stern, and of course the stern is another 200 feet away, but it’s completely impossible for the technology that we had. It was very rudimentary. We couldn't find it and we got lost again for 15 minutes, and finally found, not only the second and third hatch that blew off the deck, which was right next to the stern. But then went off the side of the stern this underwater mountain. If you can even think about going to the Sioux locks and seeing how big those freighters are and imagine being in a submarine 500 ft down and going over the top of all that steel.

It's all red. And there's little tiny bumps on it, and we're looking for scrapes and then saw that propeller and the propeller blades are, huge. Each blade is bigger than the sub and it was just immense to see it. And then to see little things like ropes and tarps and coffee cups stuff that's on the bottom of a screwdriver that was in the bottom, just makes you really realize that this is a place where people lived and worked.

Brianne: Wow. Did you see any bodies or anything? That's always the mystery.
 
 Ric: Yeah, there's 29 guys that vanished and that's the whole reason I think the newspapers were interested. We lost a big ship in ‘58 called the Bradley in ‘66. The Daniel J. Morrell broke into two pieces and one guy survived and because most of the bodies came up, I think it was largely forgotten.

But in 1975, everybody vanished, and all they found was a couple of life preservers and some rings and a little bit of debris in the lifeboats and in the life rafts that came ashore. So the big question was what happened to the crew. And right after my dive, we came up from the stern section and it was now getting late.

It was just after dinner and the sun was still out because it was the middle of July. And they said, well, we'll do one more dive. And they offered it to the crew. Owner of the tugboat that we were on. I think it was because we we'd get a deal on the price. So, he took his 12-year-old son down there and they found a body right off of the port side of the shipwreck, which none of us were expecting.

There's been over four expeditions, including Jacques Cousteau sent his submarine down there. The Coast Guard had been down there. Whitefish Point had been down twice with probably 30 hours of video down there and no one has ever reported finding a missing crewman until our expedition.

So we went from really being no bodies to now being, sadly, the bad boys that we found this, and I don't think that it was well deserved. I think it was just sad that it was put into our laps and then me as a producer, I had to decide, you know, what do you do with that story that you can't just pretend it didn't happen, and everybody wanted to know just like you said everybody wants to know is there a body down there. Sadly, yes, there is. 
 
 Brianne: This might be a weird question, but in what condition does it? I mean, because it's like what you said it was 32 degrees. So it's practically freezing down there. 

Ric: We weren't allowed to go inside the wreck. The rules that we had were that we could not put lights or cameras inside the wreck through the porthole, through the pilot house, through any of the brakes or anything like that. So we weren't allowed to actually look inside. It was only a fluke that this body was outside, and it was, you know, laying on the bottom with a life jacket on.

So the question was immediately, what happened? Why didn't this guy float? with a life jacket on. And it's possible because of the ship going down that maybe he got out of the ship by the time he was below the pressure of the water that would crush that cork jacket so it couldn't float anymore. And none of the cork has floated off the body, even though the canvas that's around the life jacket normally, kind of rotted away. And sadly, the person was kind of, like a cavity. It was not a full person or a body. It had been. Unfortunately, I think some of the creatures on the bottom had been there and that happens in the lakes just like it does in the ocean. The differences in the in the ocean.

There's Critters that will eat even bones up. But in the Great Lakes, they don't, we don't have woodworms, and we don't have these other creatures that will do that. So skeletons are very common on shipwrecks and in some cases, like the Kamloops, but Ile Royal, the bodies still have what looks like skin on them, but it's not full skin.

It's a fatty material that unfortunately happens to bodies that are in the water. 
 
 Brianne: What, do you have a theory of why none of the bodies have been discovered? Is there a scientific reason or are people just still speculating?

Ric: It was the speed at which it went down, you know, the big question really is why wasn't there even a radio call made? There were three radios on board. Why didn't they say mayday in the couple of seconds it would take to run to a radio in the pilot house or the chart room and call.

So, it happened so quickly that no one had a chance to get to a door to get out. And once that ship went down and according to the Anderson, they saw it on radar. And then within a minute it was completely gone. So, there was nothing that floated long enough for the people to get out. There was no attempt to get to the lifeboats or the life rafts.

We can tell that 'cause they were ripped away from the ship as it went down. The flotation of those deployed them, but the men sadly never had a chance to even get near them. So, 28 guys are probably inside. They're trapped in the engine room, the half section’s upside down. They will never be recovered. And that's hurt a lot of the family's feelings because that was the question we got right away was, why don't you bring that person back?

Or why don't you cut into the shipwreck and bring my brother or my uncle back? We just don't have the budget. And sadly, the person we found was in such bad shape that to even touch them would be to devastate, what's down there. And we feel that's a grave site and it shouldn't be bothered by us moving things around. 

Brianne: Is there a reason why they don't want lights in the portholes and anybody going there? Is that a safety thing or preservation? 

Ric: I think  the families have been so vocal those poor people, every November, someone wants to hear an interview from a family member, and it's a pain that has existed for decades now.

You'd think it would just kind of go away and people wouldn't be interested, but sadly, even our story kind of refuels it. And the Canadian government has always said, hey, don't go looking for bodies. The last thing they wanted us to find was a body. And that was clear with their indication of, you know, don't reach in there, don't light it up because they know someplace trapped inside there is going to be somebody. The weird thing is, there's thousands of shipwrecks over 6000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. There's no limitation on any of the United States shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. Only Canada has three wrecks that they don't want people to go down to.

And two of them have skeletons because they're from 1812 and they went down with all hands; they're warships. There's no problem recording them because there's no people around. So, it's not hard for me to picture together that all of the reason the Canadians told us we couldn't do that was because they did not want us to find a crew member.

And, and for the record, I absolutely would have not wanted to find, I'm sorry that it even happened, that we found a body down there, but it was put into our lap for some reason. I don't know why. I'd like to say because we did a better job that we covered more territory. The truth is, most of the time we were lost down there, though, so to pretend like somehow, we were these ninjas that went down there is not true. But we did come back with something that no one else had had. And that's become now for me—I've got to be the most touring lecturer on the Edmund Fitzgerald now, and that's not by design, it's just by a passion to try to get to the meaning of why we did find that and why that shipwreck has played such a big part in my life.

I've seen 150 of the shipwrecks, and I've certainly seen other remains, and this is the one that seems to kind of stick with people. And I think it's important that I spend my time getting to the truth of that. And that means going through interviews. That means doing podcasts, that means finishing a brand-new book that I'm doing right now, that I should have done in the next two months on the Fitzgerald. Then the documentary that I raised money on PBS every year with too. So, it's important to me to, to use it and do a good job, do the best job that I can. 

Brianne: I like what that kid said that God is down there. It's like, it feels like it's still alive.  Like there's life still down there, even though there isn't, but there is. It’s sort of strange. I think that might be why I would, if I were you, be so enamored by it. I am. 
 
 Ric: It's interesting that you mentioned Scott too, because some people make fun of that. I mean there's over four and a half million views on the story that I broke when we actually discovered [the body], and I put Scott Purvis’s interview on there about God being down there and 80 of the people make fun of him for it.

And I think he really believed that, and it was like going to see his uncle like he had just seen in a funeral parlor, that it wasn't this, you know, macabre thing. It was peaceful, and you knew that that was a sailor's life, and that's what happened, and that's how I kind of treated it.

It's the opposite for some of the families who are like, hey, that's a graveyard, you can't go there. But the truth is the graveyards only exist for us to go there. That's why we put up tombstones. The people who are lost don't care about that. They're gone. They're wherever they may go spiritually, you know, afterwards.

I think that a shipwreck is the tombstone for us to go and for the mysteries that are there to help to uncover what happened there and, it seems kind of weird because I certainly wouldn't do that where a bus crashed, or an airplane crashed. But a shipwreck for me, it seems like those details are all down there.

Some of them are 300 years old, and that's just what I find fascinating to not only referentially, for me, that is a grave site. Every place that I go where people lost their lives on a shipwreck is just as important as the Edmund Fitzgerald to me. That doesn't change just because it’s 200 years old, or that there's nobody around to complain about it.

So I think that's why I look at some of the family members who got very upset with us and just they have no idea where my heart is, and I think that's unfortunate. What they wanted us to do was just to walk away and never talk about it, and that would make them feel better.

But that doesn't make the rest of the world feel better, unfortunately.  

Brianne: Yeah, that seems like the opposite to me of how you would want to handle it. You know, not be silent about it, but keep the memory alive. But no, I loved what that kid said. I thought that was so real and so true. It's coming from a child's perspective, an idea in his mind, and if you study any of the Christian mystics, or any of the mystics in any religion, they would totally love what he said. Because that's true. God is down there. I love that he said, it seemed like a church, or it felt like a church. So you mentioned in one of the videos that you're going to go down there and in like another 10 years or something. I think the video was in, what was it, 2011?  

Ric: Well, there's no way to put a date on when because the Canadian government right now will pretty much laugh at anybody at my caliber. I'm so small on the chart of who's important to go down there. I say that because I think if Bob Ballard from the Titanic said, you know, I want to go see it. They would say absolutely. They did the same thing with the two other shipwrecks that are off limits. The Hamilton and the Scourged. 

They said nobody can go down there, and then Jacques Cousteau asked, can I go down there? They said, yeah. And then two other expeditions [asked to go] down there and they said, yeah, as long as they were big enough and had big names and they got to go. For some reason they didn't let Joel McGuinness, who's the famous Canadian explorer, he was not allowed to see the Hamilton and Scourge, but they let him go to the Fitzgerald. So, I don't know what's picking and where, but I do know that with the family members being so upset and then when Whitefish Point went back and scanned the shipwreck without permission, which was totally legal. I mean, they weren't allowed to bring cameras down, but they use sound waves to map it out.

And several family members got very upset, and they changed the law to prohibit even using sonar on the wreck, which is kind of silly. I mean, it's not like that's intrusive.  It's just a mapping of what's there. And, with my book, there's going to be some new revelations that there's a good possibility that that bow and that body are not even in Canadian waters. That it's been a big coverup that they've kept it right on the border and it's just ridiculous.  Until I go out there and really map exactly where it's at, I'll never know for sure,

Brianne: Why don't they want people diving to these shipwrecks? Is that a stupid question? 
 
 Ric: Just the three. The two warships I totally get. That's something that could be plundered. You know, there's cannons on board. There's stuff that people could sell.  If you said you had a ship's wheel from one of the War of 1812 ships, most of them have been destroyed.

The Niagara is the only one that I think all they had left was the keel and they rebuilt the ship. So, it's not the original, but at least there's a part of it. So, it's a historically significant wreck. The Edmund Fitzgerald, nothing was supposed to be taken off of it, but people did steal pellets off of it.

And that's another thing that'll be in my book that you're supposed to leave it all down there. And unfortunately, there's a high interest and not so much for sale, but to give to the families something that they could hold on to it. It doesn't make it right, but I see the value in that.

So would somebody want something from the Fitz’? Yeah, I think there's a lot of coffee tables, they'd love to have something from there. So to protect it is one thing, but to just say you can't go or you can't take pictures or you can't even float over the top of it and take sonar images of it, there's it's a little overstepping, I think. And unfortunately, in Canada, they don't have the openness. I think the way that we do in the United States, we do that to the Arizona, the World War II monument. So we do have it. It's just not extended into the Great Lakes.  I think that's good news.

I mean, there's a lot of shipwrecks where we've had the Lady Elgin, there were 400 people that were killed on that shipwreck, should we seal it off? No, I don't think we should. I don't think you're going to find skulls or anything. 
 
Brianne: Wow. Well, that's interesting. I read one of the comments on a YouTube video where somebody had said that over a number of years, they had been painting the watermark line higher and higher. Is there any truth to that?  
 
Ric: Do you mean as far as the international water line? 
 
Brianne: Like the weight of the ship and the water, I mean, I didn't even know they did that, but it does make sense, to make sure they didn't go over their weight.
 
Ric: Oh yeah. What happens is, the government comes in and they determine, on your ship, how low you can sit in the water and that changes for summer and it changes for winter. So, with winter storms being so prevalent on the Great Lakes, they put a mark on the side that's called a Plimsoll mark and that shows a winter line and that winter line when you go through the Sioux, you can't be deeper than that or you'll get a ticket by the Coast Guard.

So, it's their way of controlling people from hauling too much cargo. So that changes, over the years, you can apply to the Coast Guard and say, listen, we've done some new features on our ship. In the case of the Fitzgerald, they have these pipes that are in the deck and those pipes are to equalize the pressure when you use your ballast tank.

So, Fitzgerald only hauled one cargo, and that was iron ore. They would go from Superior or especially, the big mines that are up in Minnesota and they would sail from Silver Bay down to Toledo and that was their run. But when they came back, they didn't have any cargo and rather than sitting super high in the water where the propeller can't dig into the water, they loaded it full of water, so it takes in water inside in the ballast, and when that happens, you've got to open up your tanks so the air can vent out, because if you put water in, the air's got to go somewhere, so these vent pipes are in there, and that's what McSorley had said he'd lost, he said, I've got two vents missing, so those were two 8-inch holes in his deck, pouring water into his tunnel, and ballast tanks where he was trying to pull it off with his two pumps, and he couldn't get it off quick enough.

And then add in the Coast Guard saying that there were all kinds of water that was coming into the hatches. And you'd ask before what my theory is, my theory is nothing different. It's got two major hatch covers that are folded into the cargo hold. That's where a big wave came up. The one that hit the Anderson and then went forward faster than the Anderson and hit the Edmund Fitzgerald, pushed its nose underneath, and it folded in half.

The center section, I think, literally kicked under, and I know it didn't go down in one piece because the taconite did not all go forward. And that's why those cargo hatches are inside the hatch. If 26,000 tons of cargo rolled forward, that first hatch would have been packed. And unfortunately, there's hardly anything in it.

So, it somehow snapped in that center section and the stern flipped over and went down. And that's the big mystery is how in the world did that look when it went down and why didn't they give anybody a chance? And I think it was just over so quickly and filled with water so quickly that they couldn't call for help in time.

And even if they did go in the water, they'd only get minutes to survive. 
 
 Brianne: I saw an animated video like that on YouTube, and I kept watching it over and over again. I don't know if that's like the accurate depiction of what you're saying.
 
 Ric: Not yet, I haven't seen it. I've seen other people with the wave come and it pushes the nose under and that makes sense, but it couldn't have done it that there's nothing that's piled in front of that wreck. It's in the middle and the back. The stern is upside down over a pile, so it had to have crushed in the center. And when the middle section kind of accordion, you know, where all the pellets just went all over the place. That's where the taconite came out. I hope I answered your Plimsoll mark thing, though. The vent pipes were extended up higher. And they basically told the Coast Guard, listen, we made it more watertight, and the Coast Guard figured all those hatches were good. So, they let them carry more taconite in the wintertime than they normally would.

So, when you hear painted over, what they were saying was they lowered those marks, fully believing that the hatches were more watertight. They were four feet off the deck. They had seals on them. They were supposed to dog all those hatches with 69 clamps on every one of those 21 hatches.

And we just found out on the bottom that they weren't all dogged out.  
 
 Brianne: Wow. There's a lot of engineering involved.
 
 Ric: And with much smarter stuff than I am...  I've talked to a lot of people, and I've heard a lot of nonsense, but the big nonsense is that she ran aground. There is absolutely no credibility.  And so many factors pointing against her hitting rocks north of Caribou that it just didn't happen. And all the major architects said the same thing, but people still don't believe it. I think they just they want it to be a simple misjudgment by McSorley, and that's why it's on the bottom. And it was certainly the captain's fault. I don't pull any punches in my lectures that he should not have gone into that storm.

But the Anderson made it through fine and turned around and went right back into it again. The problem is the Fitzgerald would take on seven different storms that season alone. He beat that ship up and it just finally gave out on him. 
 
 Brianne: Wow, oh, that's too bad. 

Ric: It really is. It's sad, but when you look at all the ships at the bottom, I could show you a captain that thought that he was infallible and to talk to Cooper, [who] I never did interview myself, but I've heard two interviews with Cooper who was on the Anderson. He believed that ship would bring him through any storm, and he believed that's what McSorley thought, that there's no way I can be sunk and, unfortunately, you find out at the last minute that you're wrong, and there's no way to survive it. So, especially in deep water like the Carl Bradley and the other ships, you're going down and you [will] never have a bunch of people survive that, and that's what happened for so many of these wrecks, just a handful. 
 
Brianne: Wow, well, thank you for your time to tell me all these things.

Ric: There’s too many good stories and the Fitzgerald is one of them. but I always feel like sometimes it overshadows all of the really good stories of the rescues and the storms that were three times the power of the Fitzgerald [storm]. Just the guys and girls that hop in helicopters and go and save people, those are the heroes to me, it's the people that rode out there to help them.  Most of those never get a song by Gordon Lightfoot. So, I think, that's our job now is to make sure that those don't just vanish, and I'll keep pushing because it's fun to do, and I feel it's important.

Outro:

 Thank you for joining me today on Loving the Imperfect. Please consider subscribing or writing a review. New episodes are uploaded biweekly. Next time, I'll share an interview with respected music composer spiritual leader singer and retreat director, Gregory Norbet, who spent 21 years as a Benedictine monk at the Weston Priory in Vermont. 

I'm honored to have the opportunity to interview him and share his story with you. So, I'll see you then. Bye bye.