Here’s a Gordon Lightfoot-inspired question from Rabbit Hole reader Bill Hoke, who apparently makes bar bets with crusty ship captains:

The Edmund Fitzgerald! If it’s been a bit since you listened to any folksy mid-70s rock (UPDATE: You heard it if you were at the Billy Strings show in Cary last week), here’s what you need to know about this particular vessel:

I did not realize until now that Gordon Lightfoot recorded the now-legendary “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” literally a MONTH after it sank. The accident was so fresh that Lightfoot didn’t even know all of the details about it when he wrote the song! Later in life, he changed some lyrics during his live shows to make them more accurate.

The ship was apparently loaded down with ore when it left on its fateful voyage in November 1975, but even now, there’s no consensus on what caused it to sink. There were no survivors. And at 729 feet long, it’s still the largest ship ever to have sunk in the Great Lakes.

But! Could the Edmund Fitzgerald have made it up to the Port of Wilmington?

Yes. Easily.

That boat had a draft of 25 feet. The Cape Fear River is dredged to a depth of 42 feet. So yeah, the Fitzgerald would have been just fine. But what about the olden days? Wasn’t the river more shallow? Yes! But not that shallow. The Cape Fear was first dredged in 1871 to a depth of 12 feet, and it’s been at least 26 feet deep since 1912. There is no point in the Edmund Fitzgerald’s history (it launched in 1958) that it wouldn’t have been able to make it to Wilmington. Even if it was fully loaded with 26,000 tons of cargo.

(The largest ship ever to dock at Wilmington, the ZIM Mount Ranier, is 1,200 feet long and had to come in partially unloaded when it arrived in March, since it has a nearly 50 foot maximum draft. The Port of Wilmington has cranes that can handle Neopanamax ships like this one, but the channel isn’t deep enough for the ships to come in fully loaded. Yet.)

For the record, the Fitzgerald never docked in Wilmington. It wasn’t meant to hit the high seas, anyway. The Edmund Fitzgerald was a Seawaymax ship, meaning if it was any bigger, it wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the locks and canals of the St. Lawrence Seaway that connects the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean. Hence, it was a really big boat, but much smaller than the freighters that can pass through the Panama Canal or other major waterways.

Did the Edmund Fitzgerald ever leave the Great Lakes? Nope! It was built in Michigan, ran ore from mines near Duluth to places like Detroit and Toledo, and never saw the open ocean. If it was any more Midwestern, it would have hung out in a basement.

So, could the Edmund Fitzgerald have gone any further than Wilmington? Maybe? Past Wilmington, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has maintained a 25 foot depth on the Cape Fear River from Wilmington up to Navassa, so if the ship had been mostly empty, it could have gone past the Riverwalk before running aground a few miles further upstream (and would have been able to squeeze under the bridges as well). But that’s it. Past Navassa, the river is only 8-12 feet deep up to Fayetteville. The locks and dams that used to allow barges to make it that far upriver aren’t nearly big enough to handle a freighter. (They also haven’t seen a commercial barge pass through them since 1995.)

So what would have happened if—instead of sinking to the bottom of Lake Superior—the Edmund Fitzgerald would have gone down in the Cape Fear? It would have been completely covered by water, but just by a few feet. It would have also been in good company. There are plenty of shipwrecks in the river already, but you don’t know about them, do you? Maybe sensitive Canadian singer-songwriters just aren’t inspired by blockade runners named Kate.