Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim

The Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim presents epic once-in-a-lifetime experiences for up to 68 swimmers to be part of history, play a role in a documentary film, and swim where no one has ever swum before and may never swim again.     

The year 2025 marks 50 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald, bound for Detroit with over 26,000 tons of iron ore, went down in that horrific 1975 Lake Superior gale, taking 29 souls with her.  Immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, this has become the world's most famous shipwreck not named Titanic.

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of this historic maritime tragedy and to pay tribute to the 29 lost mariners, open water swimmers plan to carry on their legacy with a 17-stage, 411-mile relay swim from the point where the Edmund Fitzgerald lies in Lake Superior to Detroit.  Participating swimmers will symbolically complete the intended route and cargo delivery that the ship was tragically unable to complete on that fateful night 50 years ago, by passing between them iron ore pellets from the same dock in Superior, Wisconsin, where the "Big Fitz" took on its last load.