These swimmers plan to finish the job started by the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975

DULUTH – Famously, the Edmund Fitzgerald didn’t make it.

The Great Lakes bulk carrier was sailing from Superior, Wis., with a load of taconite bound for Zug Island, near Detroit, when it succumbed to one of the fiercest of Superior’s gales of November 1975, sinking about 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan. The “Fitz” took its 29 crewmen and 21,116 long tons of ore to the bottom.

Now a team of distance swimmers plans to mark the 50th anniversary of the great ship’s loss by completing the route the Fitzgerald couldn’t. And they will do it with at least a single ball of taconite affixed to their swimwear.

The Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim will be a 411-mile relay completed in 17 stages by a field of 68 swimmers starting Saturday and continuing into late August. Each leg has its own team of athletes who will swim in 30-minute shifts, relay-style, to cover the allotted section.

The final team is expected to finish at Lake St. Clair Crossing between Michigan and Ontario Aug. 28.

Tammy Lenarz Carruth of Montevideo, Minn., is one of the handful of swimmers from Minnesota on a roster that is more than half-filled with Michigan residents, but includes swimmers from California and Texas. She’s in the first foursome of swimmers whose journey will start right where the Fitzgerald crew’s ended.

“I think it’s going to be very surreal, being above the wreckage,” she said. “That’s their cemetery; it’s a sacred place.”

“I’m not very fast, but I’m pretty good at keeping going,” she said.

Since signing up for the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim, she has communicated with the family of a deckhand from Ashtabula, Ohio, who went down with the ship. Paul Riippa, according to his sister, Elaine Sespico, was athletic, a Christian and had wanted to become a nurse. He was honest, dependable, loving and intelligent.

“We all loved him and miss him,” Sespico said in a note shared with permission by Lenarz Carruth.

Connecting with a family tied to the Edmund Fitzgerald has added a layer of meaning to her upcoming experience.

“It really made it all so real and worthwhile,” she said.

“I’m all too familiar with that aspect of Lake Superior and our history,” she said, adding that commemorating the men who died seemed an honorable thing to do.

She’s a seasoned long-distance swimmer who finds the sport meditative and is one of four who will complete a middle route that ends at Thunder Bay Island.

Gillian McNeal of Duluth is on one of the last relay teams. She remembers being in her family’s car when the news of the Edmund Fitzgerald broke and the way it affected her family members. She’s always been haunted by the idea of the men who drowned.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” the Gordon Lightfoot song that evoked the “gales of November,” became a family favorite during camping trips, she said.

Living near Lake Superior, she likes seeing the Arthur M. Anderson, the last ship in contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald and the first one on the scene for rescue operations.

Jim “The Shark” Dreyer is at the center of this event. An endurance swimmer who favors the Great Lakes — he claims to have made his way across all of them — he’s also known for his stunt swimming. In 2013, he towed two boats filled with 2,000 pounds of bricks from Canada to Detroit.