On the 50th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, Suttons Bay native and retired captain Jeff Idema is probably somewhere thinking about those men who lost their lives on November 10, 1975.
Whether working on the ocean or the Great Lakes, there is one line of Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” that rings true for all mariners, according to Idema.
It says: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
Idema has run across oceans as a captain and along the Great Lakes aboard several massive vessels.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was Lightfoot’s most popular song. He passed away in 2024.
One cadet at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City was killed on the Fitzgerald, and Lightfoot set up a scholarship in their honor.
The scholarship supported Idema’s maritime education in a career that has taken him all over the world as he was the first recipient.
“It catapulted me to multiple oceans and lakes,” Idema said.
Idema began his life on the water as a teenager working on a mailboat that cruised from Leland to North Manitou Island. It was on a drive to work from Suttons Bay to Leland that he first heard Lightfoot’s ballad about the ore carrier that went down in Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975.
After graduating from the academy in 1981, Idema worked on Great Lakes tankers for about nine years before shifting to salt water vessels. He was spurred by an incident involving a ship on which he was serving as first mate.
The Jupiter was carrying about a million gallons of gasoline when it exploded and burned in September 1990 on the Saginaw River near Bay City.
“I had just gotten off the boat and was driving home on I-75 when I saw a huge cloud of smoke in my rearview mirror,” said Idema, who stopped along the way to call his mother in Suttons Bay — Mary Louise “Punky” Idema.
Idema took that as a sign that he needed to move on, and he did, signing onto container ships on the Pacific. He has spent the last 10 years of his career based in San Francisco, piloting container ships from the West Coast to Hawaii, Guam and China.
Idema remembers pulling his car off the road the first time he heard “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on his radio.
More than 45 years later, the 1978 Suttons Bay graduate and seafaring mariner was able to meet the man who memorialized the fate of the ill-fated ship. The song helped set his life on a sea-faring course.
Idema met Canadian folk singer and songwriter Gordon Lightfoot in person, backstage during a recent concert at Interlochen Center for the Arts.
“He was a class act,” Idema said.
Nowadays, Idema admits he doesn’t listen to the song a whole lot because it hits a little too close to home.
“It sticks with you, this was a pretty unusual profession,” he said.
Idema was in a documentary about Lightfoot called ‘lightheaded’ two years ago.
Grand Traverse Lighthouse Museum Executive Director Stef Staley is hosting a shipwreck presentation today at 1:30 p.m. at the Leland Township Library.
Although, there is no shipwreck quite like the Edmund Fitzgerald off of Leelanau, but there is plenty shipwreck lore of its own with 14 documented wrecks between Northport Point and Cathead Bay.
“None of them are the caliber or modern age of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Back in its day, sailors were using mostly wooden sailing vessels to supply the Great Lakes, and there were thousands of them,” Staley said. “Of those 14, eight have now been located and we are still looking for the rest.”
Staley says the first reported wreck was in Cathead bay in 1847, before the Grand Traverse Lighthouse was built in 1852.
The most recent was at the turn of the century in Northport Bay.
“A lot of those wrecks were based upon storms. There were November storms, and the first one was in an April storm. There’s been a couple in August and common collisions.”
