Best of 2024: 'I was afraid of dying': Gordon Lightfoot song brings back memories for former seafarer

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It was a day Randy Colombo will never forget and one that always comes into focus whenever he hears the Gordon Lightfoot hit The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald on the radio.

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a violent storm on Lake Superior in November 1975, with the loss of all 29 men aboard. It was later discovered the vessel had broken into two pieces.

Colombo was the wheelsman on another large ship, the VM Canadian Progress, in that same storm.

"We were a long way behind the 'Fitz and could not assist in any way, but still in the same storm, worst I had ever been in!" Colombo told Ryan from 104.7 The LIZARD.

"Whenever I hear that song it brings back a lot of memories, it was the only time in my life I was afraid of dying!"

Colombo recalled going to the wheelhouse in his off time and watching the waves, he estimates at up to 40ft high, hitting the ship.

"We were being tossed like a cork," he said.

To sum up just how frightening things were, he said he and fellow crew members went down into the bowels of the ship to where a conveyor belt in a special tunnel brought freight aboard. The area was lit with a row of lights.

"When we looked down there the lights disappeared," he said. The ship was bending so much in the storm they could no longer see the row of lights down the freight tunnel.

Colombo passed along an image of his Seaman's Log and a photo of the Edmund Fitzgerald he took in Ashtabula, Ohio three weeks before she went down. .

Both ships were 730’ in length and 75’ wide, the maximum size to get through the many canals throughout the Great Lakes system seaway.

Gordon Lightfoot regarded his memorialization of the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy as his finest work and Colombo, who now lives in the Lower Mainland, figures most people who live far from the Great Lakes or the coast have no real concept of the enormity of the ships that travel waterways and the hardships faced by mariners.

"To go from Duluth, Minnesota to Sept-Îles, Quebec takes ten days, it's a huge seaway system."

Colombo only spent two years as a seafarer before he moved out to British Columbia. He retired last year.

But, whenever he hears the song, when visiting friends here in the Okanagan or when livestreaming OV1039 in the Lower Mainland, he's brought right back to Nov.10, 1975.

"Now we know the ship had broken up - we didn't know that at the time - the men in the aft of the ship that went down, it twisted down. The demise that they faced, just for a couple of short seconds, they knew their demise. And that always runs clear in my mind."