By Erin Jester
The first song Tracie Baker remembers learning in elementary school was Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 folk rock ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” referring to a cargo ship destined for Detroit that sank the previous year during a fierce storm in Lake Superior.
For those growing up in the Great Lakes region, as she did, “It was in the zeitgeist,” said Baker, D.V.M., Ph.D., an associate professor in the UF College of Public Health and Health Professions’ Department of Environmental and Global Health.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy and pay tribute to the 29 crew members who were lost, 68 open water swimmers participated in the Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim, a 17-stage, 411-mile relay swim from the site of the shipwreck in Lake Superior to its intended port in Detroit. Among them was Baker, who was born the year of the shipwreck and has always been fascinated by it.
“It was an event like no other,” she said. “Life changing, in some ways.”
It wasn’t the first time Baker has braved the chilly waters of the Great Lakes, where the average water temperature in August rarely rises above the 60s. A former Division 1 college swimmer and four-time Ironman finisher, she has previously completed open water swim events in Lake Superior, Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, as well as four Ironman triathlons.
An explorer as well as an athlete, Baker became the first non-Indigenous woman to cross the Everglades from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean during the 2022 Willoughby Expedition, a 12-day, 130-mile canoe trek retracing the route first taken by explorer and scientist Hugh de Laussat Willoughby in 1897.
Baker heads the WATER Lab, where her research focus is environmental toxicology, investigating emerging contaminants in aquatic environments. She has conducted research in the Lake Huron to Erie corridor for eight summers, which Baker said led her to choose the final leg of the memorial relay swim. Coincidentally, the last stage of the swim started and ended on her research team’s study sites.
Around 7 a.m. on Aug. 26, she plunged into the St. Clair River in Algonac, Michigan, alternating with three other swimmers to cover the final 30.5 miles to Belle Isle in Detroit. The group swam until sundown, getting back in the water the next morning for the final stretch.
The swimmers were accompanied by a boat, where they rested between their shifts. Baker’s family and friends followed closely from another boat, cheering her on the whole time.
Baker said landing on Belle Isle and participating in a memorial ceremony for the lost mariners the next day was emotional. They sat in the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral while the church bell rang 29 times and Lightfoot’s lyrics were sung.
The Edmund Fitzgerald memorial took place on the fifth anniversary of her father’s death, making the moment even more personal. Her family took several trips to visit nearby Whitefish Point and the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, which Baker and her father loved to visit together.
“He would’ve loved this,” Baker said.