Visiting the SS ‘Meteor,’ sister ship to sunken ‘James B Colgate’
July 21, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
by Shelley Nelson | Source: Superior Daily Telegram
Gordy Gebhardt, 80, made the journey to see the Meteor one more time. He has fond memories of the ship and had once imagined himself walking into the crew’s galley for a cup of coffee. That became a reality Friday.
“I grew up on the water, love the water, and I have been a huge boat nerd all my life,” said David Frew, a professor emeritus with Gannon University in Erie.
His current venture is a book about Lake Erie’s historic black Friday storm, when four ships including the James B. Colgate, a sister ship to the SS Meteor, sunk on Oct. 20, 1916.
“One of the things people in Duluth have no concept of is just how rough the water on Lake Erie gets, said Roger Pellett, a member of the Meteor Advisory Committee, which is working to research the ship’s history. “We have vast periods of time where Lake Superior looks like it does today, where it’s like a mill pond. Then there six or eight times a year there are big rollers coming in.”
Lake Erie, which is not as deep as the other Great Lakes, is choppier, particularly on its western end, and is fraught with navigational hazards.
The night of Oct. 20, 1916, created one of those “perfect storm explosions,” Frew said. A storm was rising from the Ohio Valley and clashed with an Alberta Clipper coming from the north.
Capt. Walter Grashaw “went out when others didn’t go, and he was met by this horrific storm,” Frew said. “The captain reported 40- to 50-foot waves and 100 mph winds. It lasted a long time and the direction never shifted.”
The Colgate, a 302-foot steel whaleback, was steaming west from Buffalo with a load of coal when it went down off Long Point, Ontario. Of the 26 men on board, Grashaw was the lone survivor. After 36 hours clinging to rope edges on a raft, he was nearly described as half-dead when he was recovered, according to the New York Times archives.
The black Friday storms also claimed the D.L. Filer, a wooden bulk freight schooner-barge, Marshall Butters, a wooden lumber hooker, and the Merida, a steel freighter with wooden deckhouses, claiming the lives of 58 sailors.
“The Colgate is a famous Lake Erie shipwreck, but it’s a whaleback built here in Superior,” Frew said.
Read the full story about this visit, past & current books at the Superior Daily Telegram >>
