Event Director of the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim, rings the ship's bell at the 30th anniversary Edmund Fitzgerald memorial event on November 10, 2005, three months after swimming across Lake Superior.Photo: EdmundFitgeraldSwim.org
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. -- Jim "The Shark" Dreyer is organizing an Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the ship's sinking.
The late-July 2025 swim will pay tribute to the 29 crew members who perished on November 10, 1975, in Canadian waters near Whitefish Point. Boats usually are not allowed to pass over the exact location of the shipwreck, but organizers of the memorial have secured a special permit from Canada to do so.
Dreyer said on West Michigan's Morning News it will be a 17-stage, 411-mile relay swim from where the Edmund Fitzgerald lies in Lake Superior to Detroit, the ship's intended destination.
The swim will symbolically finish the crew's journey. The ship was carrying about 26,000 tons of iron ore when it went down during a storm. And some iron ore will be brought to the mayor of Detroit at the end of the swim.
"The film is going to be called The Legend Lives On, and it's going to be documenting these 68 swimmers," Dreyer told WOOD Radio. "And, really, the whole journey, all 411 miles. You know, from town to town, down the coastline and everything that these swimmers go through.
"The cool thing is these swimmers are making history while they're commemorating history. And then the back story is if of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And even a larger back story is the shipping industry in the Great Lakes, and how it really built the economies of both the United States and Canada," said Dreyer, of Byron Center.
The event will begin with a ceremony in the waters over where the Edmund Fitzgerald's wreckage lies. Family members of those who died will be there.
Dreyer said he began organizing the memorial swim in the fall of 2023. He said he expects the (Fahrenheit) water temperature in Lake Superior in July to be in the 50s or colder.
He is recommending that the swimmers wear wet suits.
More than 30,000 mariners have died at least 6,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, and that is just since records have been kept.
More information is available via this website link.
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