HE HAD TO GO OUT:                                                       
Jack Diepert and the Wreck of the Henry Cort
(Working Title)

By Neel Zoss   (About Zoss)   

A Must-Read for Non-fiction and Shipwreck Enthusiasts

Jack Diepert knew that he had to go out that cold, snowy, vicious night of November 30, 1930. As a new Surfman, this would be his first official rescue. But the young man knew there was a chance he would not make it back in. So did the other members of the five-man lifesaving crew at Muskegon, Michigan’s Coast Guard Station.          
            The churning surf had just tossed the 340-foot steel whaleback steamer Henry Cort like a rag doll onto the breakwater at Muskegon’s channel. The lives of Captain Charles Cox and his twenty-five man crew depended on the five brave men headed their way on an angry Lake Michigan.         
            That Friday had begun as just an ordinary sailing day for the crew of the Henry Cort; a quick trip from Holland, Michigan across the big lake to Chicago with another load of scrap iron. A voyage the Henry Cort and her crew had completed too many times to count. They looked forward to completing this run, laying up the old boat for another winter, then going home to family and friends. However, before that day would end, the crew would test their mettle as they faced a life and death struggle—on the wrong side of an angry Great Lake 120 miles from their intended destination. So too would the Coast Guardsmen sent to their rescue. Not everyone would live to see the next day.    
            Meticulously researched and full of details to satisfy Great Lakes boat aficionados, Neel Zoss, a celebrated historian of the unique whaleback barges and steamships, and author of McDougall’s Great Lakes Whalebacks, presents a historically accurate and edge-of-your-seat narrative of the loss of the Henry Cort and the rescue of its crew. He Had To Go Out will take the reader to that violent night so long ago when a small group of men took the Coast Guard’s unofficial motto—“you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back”—to heart and put everything, including life itself, on the line so that others might live.

Regional Studies-
ISBN: 978-0-9801750-5-4

Coming in the Fall of 2011   Soft Cover | $19.95

Email the publisher for a notice and special offer when the book is available:
info@in-deptheditions.com