Ryan Sajdak

No big freighter has gone down in open water on the Great Lakes since the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. Almost every accident on this route since then has happened in a river, a canal or a lock.

This is the whole trip an ocean ship makes out of Duluth with a load of wheat: about 2,200 miles, 16 locks, and 600 feet downhill to the Atlantic at Cabot Strait. At 13 knots with no delays it takes about a week.

The narrow places are the story. Ships built for this route are 78 feet wide and the locks are 80. The channel through the Thousand Islands squeezes to 450 feet, and two ocean ships lost their steering there a year apart, in 2014 and 2015. The seven locks above Montreal close in early January. In January 2026, eleven ocean ships were still above Montreal when the deadline passed.

The deadliest spot on the route is not on a lake at all. It is in the St. Lawrence near Rimouski, where the Empress of Ireland sank in fog in 1914 with 1,012 people.

Modeled in Blender. Ship track from the Army Corps waterway network. Numbers from NOAA's Coast Pilot 6, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the National Weather Service and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.