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Thirty-two years after the legendary SS Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Lake Superior, a piece of it may have surfaced.
Joe Rasch and his family were looking for rocks last Friday when he spotted an orange, battered lifesaver near the shore of the Keweenaw Peninsula, a northwestern point of Michigan jutting out into the lake.
An undated photo of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a now-legendary ore carrier that sank during a storm on Lake Superior, Nov. 10, 1975.
(Lake Superior Maritime Collection, University of Wisconsin-Superior/Canadian Press) The flotation device was under a fallen pine tree. Rasch thought little of it and handed it over to his daughters.
"I rolled it down the hill to my daughter. She caught it, then another daughter came along and said, 'Dad, there's writing on it,'" Rasch told CBC News.
The faded white letters were hard to decipher, but his daughter read them out: Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend of the U.S. freighter has been memorialized in paintings and songs, such as Gordon Lightfoot's ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Loaded with iron ore and bound for a Detroit steel yard, the ship sank on Nov. 10, 1975, after nearly a day of battling fierce winds and high waves from a winter storm. All 29 aboard the ship died.
Rescue crews arriving hours after the vessel sank found little but battered lifeboats and twisted pieces of metal.
Weeks later, a few other artifacts surfaced on the Keweenaw Peninsula, but nothing else since Rasch's discovery there last week.
"We have a number of artifacts from the Fitzgerald but certainly nothing that has shown up 32 years after the fact," said Tom Farnquist, director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish, Mich.
"I think it would be significant if it was proven to be an authentic piece from the Fitzgerald. It's a remarkable story."
It hasn't been confirmed whether the lifesaver is authentic, but it is identical in size to one already displayed in the museum.
Wow! Very interesting. I wonder how long it was under the tree? Lake Superior has the greatest retention of any of the Great Lakes so it could have been a float for years before landing on shore. I know there was a teenager that was swept off a pier in southern Lake Michigan a couple years ago. His body washed a shore over a year later.
