EAGLE HARBOR, MI – As Great Lakes stories go, this one might sound like it ranks right up there with a “big fish” tale or a mermaid sighting. But it’s got a survivor who gave his harrowing account to authorities 21 years ago this month.
A 698-foot iron ore carrier was crossing Lake Superior on the night of Oct. 10, 1999 when a young crewman said he lost his footing while securing some barrels on the deck. His fall overboard went unnoticed. Hours later, he crawled onto the shore near Eagle Harbor in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, according to the Associated Press. He’d swum 4.5 miles to reach land. He’d done it in 46-degree water, in an inland sea that was churning with up to 8-foot waves at the time, using only the lights from a radio antenna in Eagle Harbor as a beacon toward land. He had no life jacket.
The story of Scott Richards' survival made national headlines. The 28-year-old from Willoughby Hills, Ohio was treated for hypothermia in a U.P. hospital before quietly slipping out a day later, leaving word he didn’t want to talk to news reporters about his amazing swim to shore.
This week, a Michigan tourism group marked the anniversary of Richards' survival swim by sharing the Associated Press story about it. This piqued the curiosity of a lot of big lake lovers who had never heard about this before – and it attracted attention from plenty of skeptics, some of whom work on the Great Lakes. They wondered: Could anyone really survive Lake Superior’s numbing cold, rough conditions and swim that long without their body giving out?
MLive reached out to a gentleman named Scott Richards who reportedly works as part of a maritime crew on the Great Lakes, to see if he is the same man who made the dramatic swim - and if he could share those memories with us. So far, we have not heard from him.
But the Richards who garnered all the headlines in 1999 didn’t manage to leave Michigan without sharing at least a little bit of his story. Two reporters working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer from Richards' home state tracked him down at the Houghton County Airport as he was preparing to fly home after his release from the hospital. In those days of laxer airport security, he could board an airplane home even if he no longer had his driver’s license or any other form of photo ID. He was a bit of a celebrity already.
“I’m the guy who fell off the boat in Lake Superior,” Richards told the airport employee who’d been asking him for ID, according to the Plain Dealer’s report. “We’ll take care of it,” the man assured Richards, clearing the way for him to walk onto the Northwest Airlines flight.
An airport security officer at the time named Gary Cresswell summed up why Michiganders were in awe of Richards' feat.
“They ought to sign that guy up for the Olympics,” Cresswell told the Plain Dealer. “Unless you’ve lived here, you can’t understand how terrible Lake Superior can be. You just don’t survive in the lake for that long. That is one lucky man. To tell the truth, I don’t know how he managed it.”
That part has remained somewhat shrouded in mystery.
Richards' overboard ordeal started on the S.S. Buckeye on the night of Sunday, Oct. 10, 1999. The ore freighter and crew were on their way to Silver Bay Harbor, Minnesota and were underway near Copper Harbor at the edge of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. Richards told authorities he was on the ship’s deck when he noticed some barrels had come loose. He was working to secure them when the boat rolled, pitching him into the dark water 50 feet below.
“I don’t have much memory of what happened,” Richards told the Plain Dealer. “I just have flashes here and there. I remember hitting the water, surfacing and swimming, surfacing and swimming.”
The Buckeye’s crew members last reported seeing Richards about 8 p.m. But he wasn’t reported missing until nearly four hours and 90 miles later when he failed to show up for his shift. The Coast Guard was notified just before midnight of the missing sailor. It sent a helicopter from Air Station Traverse City, a 47-foot rescue boat from nearby Houghton and a 180-foot buoy tender from Duluth, Minnesota. It was a needle-in-a-watery haystack attempt, with the rescue crews trying to comb a 90-mile swath of Lake Superior in a nighttime search that would yield nothing.
Richards later described the wave conditions to reporters as closer to 3-footers, and said the only light he could see from out in Lake Superior was that radio antenna at Eagle Harbor. “The water was cold, very cold,” he told the Plain Dealer.
He estimated he swam anywhere from three to five hours before his feet touched the lake’s bottom at Eagle Harbor. A Coast Guard official later said a person is not expected to survive more than two hours in the water in those conditions.
Once he reached the shoreline, Richards said he fell asleep.
``Given last night’s conditions (Richards) overcame amazing odds,″ Mark Dobson, a Coast Guard operations duty officer at the time, told The Mining Journal of Marquette the next day, after Richards had contacted police.
A Wary Welcome
When Richards woke up on the shoreline, he later told police he walked to find help. The first people he reached were more than a little suspicious of this man in obviously bad shape who knocked on their door at 3:30 a.m. Clarence and Anne Bach, 80-year-old retirees, had an understandable initial reaction
“We thought he was drunk,” Anne Bach told the Plain Dealer. They also wondered if he was having mental issues. "He said, `I fell off an ore boat - can you please call the sheriff?' " she said.
Bill Luokkanen, the Keweenaw County deputy who responded to the Bachs' emergency call, admitted to being skeptical, too. In fact, he recalled he was a little ticked at having to go on a call in the middle of the night for something that could be a bunch of nonsense.
“I thought it was one of our local beauties, you know, having some delusions about being a sea captain,” said Luokkanen. “I was a little irritated. That’s disorderly conduct right there, waking somebody up at 3:30 in the morning.”
“It’s not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, but it’s close,” he said. “The last thing I ever expected when I got a call that somebody fell off an ore freighter was that somebody actually fell off an ore freighter and swam five miles to shore.”
“I called dispatch and told them to call the Coast Guard and see if there was an SS Buckeye and if there was a seaman missing.” He added: “He was telling the truth.”
Richards appeared to be going “in and out” of shock when police reached him. He spent a day in a local hospital, being treated for exhaustion and hypothermia. The Bachs visited him, making sure he was doing OK. From his hospital bed, Richards turned down numerous interview requests with network TV, “Dateline” and other news shows, the hospital told The Plain Dealer. Even though Richards didn’t seem keen on talking about his experience, he was the talk of the Keweenaw Peninsula.
“I think he had a guardian angel,” Eleanor Sutinen told the Plain Dealer while sipping soda at a bar on Main Street in Calumet, about 20 miles from Eagle Harbor. “How did he do it? How did he do it?” Roger Kargela wanted to know from his seat at the other end of the bar.
The Lake Carriers Association, a shipping industry group headquartered in Cleveland, said Richards' experience was certainly unique. They’d had no other reports of crewmen falling off a vessel that was underway.
When he was interviewed on his way out of Michigan, Richards was asked if he planned to go back out on the Great Lakes. His fiancée, who had come to Michigan to be with him, said she wanted him to stay on solid ground. Richards' thoughts on that? “No comment.”
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