Holding Our Own: SS Edmund Fitzgerald

Inspired by Max’s blog, ‘Old Steam Ships’ –
this is my fiction story based on facts about the
SS Edmund Fitzgerald from the vantage point
of SS Anderson First Mate, Morgan Clark.

The radar had been lying to us all night, throwing back ghosts of snow and spray, but the blip ten miles ahead was real. The Fitzgerald. Big Fitz, the crew called her, the biggest boat on the lakes, but out here tonight she looked like a toy in a bathtub someone was shaking.

My name is Morgan Clark, First Mate and Officer of the Watch of the SS Anderson. I’d been on watch on the bridge since four, and by seven the wind gauge had quit making sense; gusts past seventy, the anemometer needle slapping around like it wanted out. Waves came over the bow of our ship in sheets of green water …. not spray …. sheets of green water, and she was pitching so hard the coffee mugs had been swept off the mess table an hour ago and nobody bothered picking them up.

Captain Cooper had the radio open to the Fitzgerald most of the evening; Captain McSorley’s voice came through in pieces, chopped by the static and the distance. Around five he’d said they’d lost both radars. Around six he said they’d taken a list, lost a fence rail, some vents. Cooper told him to keep barometric pressure in mind, watch the waters off Caribou Island, hold his position behind us so we could keep eyes on him best we could.

At 7:10 I heard McSorley’s voice on the radio for what turned out to be the last time:

“We are holding our own,” he said.

Nothing in his voice said anything different than that. No fear in it. Just a man reporting the facts as he understood them.

I went back to my radar screen because that’s what you do …. you keep the watch, you don’t think too hard about a boat and twenty-nine men ten miles off your stern in the worst sea I’d seen in eleven years on the lakes. The wind had backed around, the snow had closed in so tight the running lights on our own bow were just a smudge, and for a few minutes, I didn’t check the screen.

And when I did, the blip was gone.

“Anderson to Fitzgerald, come in.” Nothing. Cooper tried the radio himself, three times, four. Nothing came back but the storm noise, that empty hiss that fills a channel when there’s no one on the other end of it anymore.

We turned the Anderson around into thirty-five-foot seas to go look, because that’s what you do …. you go look, even when going back out into that water might kill you as well. We found nothing. No wreckage, no men, no lifeboats, nothing floating at all. Just the lake, doing what it does, giving back no answers, only the wind, and the waves, still coming.

The nothingness. That’s what haunts me.

NAR©2026

Nancy’s Notes: Morgan Clark was the Officer of the Watch (radarman) and First Mate on the SS Arthur M. Anderson who tracked the SS Edmund Fitzgerald on the radar during the fatal storm on November 10, 1975. Working closely with Captain Jesse “Bernie” Cooper on the bridge, Clark monitored the Fitzgerald as it battled hurricane-force winds and monstrous waves. He famously had to deal with significant “sea return” (interference caused by the massive waves bouncing the radar signal back) and fielded the final radio transmission from the doomed ship at approximately 7:10 p.m., in which Captain Ernest McSorley reported, “We are holding our own.

This is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Home Free

SS Edmund Fitzgerald: The Mighty Fitz

^{Everything on The Elephant’s Trunk was created by me, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks for your consideration. NAR©2017-present.}