Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum

To commemorate the many ships that failed to round that point of safety, Whitefish Point [1] is now the proper home of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum (18335 N. Whitefish Point Rd., Paradise, 888/492-3747, www.shipwreckmuseum.com [2], 10 a.m.–6 p.m. daily May–Oct., $12 adults, $8 children). With dim lighting and appropriately haunting music, this fine, compact museum traces the history of Great Lakes commerce and the disasters that sometimes accompanied it.

Several shipwrecks are chronicled here, each with a scale model, photos or drawings, artifacts from the wreck, and a description of how and why it went down. Most compelling is the Edmund Fitzgerald display, complete with a life preserver and the ship’s huge bell, recovered in a 1994 expedition led by museum founder Tom Farnquist, an accomplished diver and underwater photographer.

Housed in the former Coast Guard station, the museum also includes the restored light keeper’s home, a theater showing an excellent short film about the Fitzgerald dive, and an interesting gift shop with nautical charts, prints, books, and more. To reach it, take M-123 to Paradise and follow Whitefish Point Road 11 miles north. The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum alone makes this out-of-the-way point a worthy detour.