On November 18, 1958, the 640-foot freighter Carl D. Bradley was lost on Lake Michigan. Built in Lorain, Ohio in 1927, she was launched with the proud distinction of being the longest ship on the lakes. Her brief mayday transmission, on channel No. 51, was cut short with the hull breaking in two, effectively severing all electrical power to the wheelhouse and her radios.

The only ship near the scene at the time was the 250-foot German freighter Christian Sartori, commanded by Capt. Paul Muller, a former German U-boat officer. While only four miles distant from the Bradley's position at the time of her mayday, the Witch of November would hamper her arrival on scene for nearly two hours in responding to the unwritten law of the sea, "to aid and assist those in distress."

Like the captains of the freighters, Arthur M. Anderson and the William Clay Ford, who, 17 years later would place their own ships in the same peril searching for survivors of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the German skipper searched throughout the night with his own lights and parachute flares dropped from a Coast Guard amphibian from Traverse City Air Station. His description of the conditions at the time would echo one of the last transmissions from the Fitzgerald years later by her skipper, Ernest McSorley: "It's the worst sea I have ever seen!"

From Charlevoix, Michigan, the USCGC Sundew set out into the teeth of the gale with what amounted to a skeleton crew, after having issued an emergency recall less than an hour earlier. Taking rolls of 50 degrees, tool bins broke loose within her machinery spaces, launching their contents like missiles within the compartment; water was taken down the stack; and an autopsy of the ship's mascot days later revealed a dog that had died of fright.

At dawn, November 9, a Coast Guard helicopter from Traverse City sighted an empty lifeboat and, shortly thereafter, an 8-by-10-foot orange raft with two men aboard. Lt. Cmdr. Harold Muth of the Sundew piloted his ship to the scene, and radioed a brief message: "Picked up two survivors on raft, 071 degrees, 5.25 miles from Gull Island." Firstmate Elmer Fleming and Deck Watchman Frank Mays would be the sole survivors of the Bradley disaster.

In those days, TV photojournalism was still somewhat a new thing with the 6 o'clock news, and I can yet recall the vision of Mays and Fleming being carried across the gangplank of the Sundew on stretchers, wrapped in blankets, with their faces raw from exposure.

From that moment on, I became an aficionado of Great Lakes lore and legend. Perhaps I, too, was a non-believer of the fury and potential of the lakes and needed to see it for myself. Many a moment was spent in study hall, with boyhood daydreams of joining the Coast Guard and being a part of a major rescue at sea. However, the thought of an ocean rescue seemed not only insignificant but too distant and impersonal. It was the vision of a major disaster on the Great Lakes during a gale of November that I wanted to be part of.