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APPENDIX J Lyman Nedeau/The Salvor While writing this book, I learned that one of the survivors of the Salvor wreck, Lyman Nedeau, was still alive. I reached him at his winter home in Florida with the help of mutual friends and found he was very willing to share his memories of the experience. The following account is not verbatim but written from notes taken during several phone conversations. I sent the narrative to Mr. Nedeau after each revision for his corrections and approval. In June 2002 I met him in person and learned a few more details, which I added to his account. Lyman Nedeau has lived around water most of his life. He was born on Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan, the son of a commercial fisherman. When he was still young, his family moved to the Port Sherman area of Muskegon, their home less than a block from the channel. Here his father, Israel Nedeau, continued to work in the fishing industry. The Nedeau family grew to include eight children—seven boys and one girl. In 1930, at the age of seventeen, Nedeau went to work for the T. L. Durocher Company. His father had become friends with the company’s owners, who were based in De Tour, Michigan. This connection helped Nedeau get a job on the stone barge Salvor. While some of the men on the vessel had more specialized work as firemen and crane operators, Nedeau took on various duties—deckhand, wheelsman, and dishwasher in the galley—and enjoyed the time he spent onboard. At the Muskegon breakwater site, the stone barges would anchor in the channel. A temporary railroad track had been built along the beach to the shore end, and a hopper, once filled with stone from the barge, would run along the track and deposit its load at the end of the growing arm. On September 25, the Salvor was loaded at Gill’s Rock with 2,800 tons of stone. The heavy cargo—half of which was stowed in the forward hold and half in the stern— gave the barge a draft of 30 feet. The following morning, when the Salvor, towed by the tug Fitzgerald, was heading for Muskegon, Nedeau, along with another crewman, George Secord, was on duty in the pilothouse. It was his turn at the wheel. Although the barge had no engines and was towed by a tug, it was still necessary to steer the vessel, and the men on the Salvor took turns as wheelsmen. When the storm hit, the Fitzgerald and Salvor struggled through the huge waves whipped up by the sixty-five-miles-per-hour winds. Nedeau counted nine waves to the mile. He recalled how the five-hundred-foot towline—a steel cable one-and-a-half inches thick—connecting the vessels was “taut as a fiddle string” when both the stern of the tug and the bow of the barge rode high on the wave crests. Under such conditions, the larger vessel severely hindered the tug, which 181 appendix j could barely make headway. The waves would push the Salvor toward the shore, and the tug would be pulled back along with it. Nedeau said because they were in such heavy seas and shallow water, the Salvor’s crew realized they were not going to make it to Muskegon harbor. When the cable snapped under the strain, waves turned the barge around so the bow was pointed north. About half a mile from shore, the barge struck bottom and her keel broke amidships under the tons of the stone, which weighted both ends of the ship. After tying down the wheel, Nedeau and George Secord came down from the pilothouse in the stern, and Nedeau worked his way along the boom, or crane, which lay lengthwise on the vessel, bracing himself against it or lying flat on the deck whenever a wave broke over the barge. He reached the base of the A-frame at midship and clambered up the framework to the “rooster” on top, following two other crewmen—Clifford Lane and Harry Smith—who went aloft. Nedeau explained that the “rooster” was the nickname for the system of pulleys atop the A-frame that handled the cables for the cranes. Crewmen— himself included—had to climb up to the “rooster” every six hours to keep the pulleys greased when the machinery was in operation. Both Smith and Nedeau had on their life preservers; however, Lane was not wearing...

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