Don't make the mistake of confusing the Great Lakes with lakes

Isn't this boat too big for Lake Michigan?" I was so astonished by the query that I almost dropped my deck-scrubbing brush. For one thing, my boat isn't that big. It doesn't come close to satisfying the civilized standard for proper sailboat size-a foot of waterline length for each year of the owner's age. (I'm to the point where I would gladly settle for a foot per year of overall length, but the boat falls short of this moving target too.) What's more, how could the fellow who asked the question not be aware that no sailboat can be too big for the Great Lakes?

It turned out he had a good excuse. He was newly arrived from the UK. Someone who lives on an island in the Atlantic Ocean shouldn't be expected to easily grasp the concept of landlocked seas. Besides, my dockside visitor has plenty of company in his naivete.

One of the more colorful underestimates of Great Lakes weather is carved in the lore of the Chicago-Mackinac Race. Whenever Mac veterans gather for fermented or distilled refreshment, the story of Ted Turner's hubris and subsequent comeuppance is likely to be retold with a reverence befitting a legend.

Turner came to Chicago for the 1970 race, and in the course of validating his "Mouth of the South" moniker proceeded to mock Lake Michigan sailing conditions. Told that forecasts hinted at boisterous weather in the northern part of the lake, he replied, "Yeah, I'm really scared." In flukey air after the start, he carried on the lakes-are-wimpy patter. Twenty-four hours later, sailing under a storm trysail in the Manitou Passage, he would declare, "I hereby publicly retract anything and everything I have ever said about inland sailing."

The instrument of Turner's epiphany was a cold front that ran into the fleet like a freight train hauling a gale of wind on the nose, ferocious seas and frigid temperatures. Yacht designer and sailing journalist Bruce Kirby, who was a member the crew of Turner's American Eagle and reported the skipper's comments, said he saw the wind gauge hit 60 knots. Eagle blew out every sail but one, but managed to finish the race. Eighty-eight boats didn't.

Turner should have read his Melville more carefully. There's a warning in Moby-Dick that goes: "Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan-possess an ocean-like expansiveness . . . they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew."

Turner could at least plead unfamiliarity with the freshwater seas. Others who have misjudged the lakes should have known better. One of the worst seafaring disasters in American history, and the most deadly ever on the Great Lakes, involved professional seamen who knew those waters as intimately as any sailors could. Their story is told in the newly published book White Hurricane by David G. Brown.

The title is not fanciful. The storm that savaged all of the five Great Lakes in November 1913 was a hurricane by every measure except the language of the Weather Bureau, which refused to post hurricane warnings for a storm that was not tropical. Wind strength surpassed 90 mph. Waves reached heights of 35 feet. The storm raged with unrelenting fury for the better part of a week. It one-upped a tropical hurricane by adding copious snow and ice, hence its fame as the "white" hurricane. Its death toll was 19 ships and 253 sailors.

"All the world knows that death lurks upon the Great Lakes in November," an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer observed after the storm. The captains who lost their ships, their crews and their own lives surely knew that. The gales of November were infamous long before they were introduced to pop culture by Gordon Lightfoot's hit song about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior in November 1975. Yet ship after ship left safe ports and steamed into the white hurricane in spite of obvious signs of a building storm confirmed by weather station flags that, while not indicating a hurricane, signalled "a storm of marked violence." Theirs was not the swaggering hubris of Turner; they just refused to believe their long steel ships were not a match for the lakes. They counted on the fact that weather in the Great Lakes region, while often violent, moved fast. Storms blew in and blew out in a day or so. This one stayed.

Meteorologists didn't understand the storm 90 years ago, and they still don't. The best guesses are that an exotic combination of low pressure systems, energized by a jet stream bent far to the south, nourished the storm for days. Weather records of the time, primitive as they were, don't shed much light, but the survivors' accounts and news stories Brown unearthed dramatically illuminate a seafaring nightmare. The accounts of the sailors' travail are hair-raising.

The second mate of the bulk carrier L.C.Waldo told reporters: "We were about 45 miles northeast of Keweenaw Point (on Lake Superior) when we were hit by a big wave. The wave carried away the front of the pilothouse, both sides and the front of the texas (the large deckhouse under the pilothouse). It tore things loose in the captain's room, bent the steel deck of the compass room, wrecked the compass and swept the wheelsman out of the wheelhouse. That's what one wave did."

Lake Huron became a graveyard. Captains heading north into the gale, barely able to move against the mountainous seas were tricked by logic into turning and running with the storm toward the harbors they had left at the bottom of the lake, not knowing that the storm would reach its horrible crescendo there. Some of the freighters, rolled by broadside waves, did not even survive the turn.

The chief engineer of the 480-foot Howard M. Hanna Jr. recalled, "About 6:30 p.m. the bloody destruction began. The oiler's door on the starboard side was first to get smashed in. Shortly afterward the two engine room doors and windows went. It was terrible. Tons of icy water poured into the engine room."

The Hanna made it. Eight other ships on Lake Huron, including the mighty James Carruthers, did not. The storm respected neither size nor apparent seaworthiness. The Carruthers was 529 feet long, one of the newest and strongest ships on the lakes.

On Lake Michigan, the fate of the passenger ship Illinois was happier. Her resourceful captain drove the bow of the vessel onto the south shore of South Manitou Island-which defines the passage where 57 years later Ted Turner saw the light-put a line around a tree and rode out the storm in a tiny but safe lee.

That's a heartening vignette, but overall White Hurricane is a tragedy-in the storm's aftermath, bodies washed onto beaches for days, while the ghostly capsized hull of a freighter drifted on Lake Huron. It leaves no doubt that a hurricane on the Great Lakes is no different than one on the Atlantic or Caribbean, except that it can come with snow and ice and a treacherous lee shore for every wind direction.

I recommend the book, especially for anyone tempted to make the mistake of confusing the Great Lakes with lakes.