CHAPTER TEN
The Unsalted Seas
Unfortunately, Sandy Steele was wrong.
Things could get worse, and they did.
They worsened, not only for the two youths from Valley View, California, but for everyone aboard the James Kennedy—to say nothing of all those other thousands of human souls who sailed the lower Lakes on that memorable summer morning.
For it was on that morning that a freak summer storm that had been rushing down from the north, roared like a scourge across Lake Huron before bursting in all its fury upon the shallow waters of Lake Erie. It was a storm that blew with shattering force across a body of water notorious for rough weather.
There are no storms so sudden and so strong as those that fall upon the Great Lakes, and Sandy Steele and Jerry James were about to witness one of the worst within the memory of the grizzled sailors of “the unsalted seas.”
There are the treacherous gales, and sometimes hurricanes, of late fall or early winter—those wailing winds that sheathe a ship in fresh-water ice, before driving it to its destruction.
In the days of sailing ships, there have been single storms upon the Lakes in which as many as a hundred ships—with thousands of sailors and passengers—have perished within twenty-four hours. Steam-driven freighters, and motorships, too, have sunk to the bottom of these cold waters—and more than a few of the ocean liners that have managed to make their way to the Lakes via the St. Lawrence River have gone to a fresh-water grave.
The very first ship to sail the Lakes was the bark, Griffon, of the famous French explorer, LaSalle. It set sail from Buffalo on August 7, 1679, reached the shores of Lake Michigan, and then disappeared completely on its return voyage.
From Superior to Ontario, the floors of the Lakes are littered with all manner of ships that have gone down in these storms—with their cargoes, their jewels, their gold, their stacks of currency still undamaged in safes.