Detroit – An apple farmer and his family believe they’ve found a life ring from the Edmund Fitzgerald, roughly 200 miles from where the famed ship sank in Lake Superior 32 years ago.
The orange preserver is worn by the elements and has been chewed on by small animals. But it reads “Edmund Fitzgerald” in faded but legible white letters.
No definitive tests had yet been conducted to prove it’s a piece of the ore carrier that sank in a vicious storm on Nov. 10, 1975, killing 29 men off the northern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. But the director of a shipwreck museum says it matches, in many ways, another ring in its Fitzgerald collection.
“I saw it, photographed it and … compared the two,” said Tom Farnquist, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society. “It’s identical in size and configuration. … Is it possible? Certainly, it is.”
Joe Rasch said he was vacationing with his family last week in the Keweenaw Peninsula in Michigan’s far north. Hunting for rocks along a remote beach, he found the preserver near an overturned tree. His daughters noticed the writing, and realizing its potential significance, they took it to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, owned by the historical society.
There are a few differences between the discovered ring and the one on display. The one Rasch found has no “S.S.” before “Edmund Fitzgerald,” as the museum’s ring does. And the newly found ring reads “Duluth” on its back side.
Farnquist said the differences are puzzling but not without a plausible explanation: The Milwaukee-based ship spent its winters in Duluth, Minn.
There are those who doubt the preserver came from the ship, especially since it was found so far from the Fitzgerald’s gravesite so many years later.
“I am smelling a rat,” said Frederick Stonehouse, maritime historian and author of a book on the wreck. “It’s probably a hoax.”
