on Gull Rock near Manitou Island. With the bow wedged in the rocks, the hull shredded and a crack forming in the deck, the captain ordered everyone to the bow and that the ship be flooded to prevent the ship from being washed back into the depths of the lake. The steward's wife and her mother were reluctant to leave the stern and the crew struggled to carry them over hundreds of feet of open deck in the 70 MPH blizzard, including traversing a now-widening crack in the deck. During the process the chief engineer and two stokers ran the ship at full power to try to wedge the bow further onto the shore. Then they abandoned the stern and took shelter with the others in the unheated windlass room. November 9 By noon on Sunday, weather conditions on lower Lake Huron were close to normal for a November gale. Barometric pressures in some areas began to rise, bringing hopes of an end to the storm. The low pressure area that had moved across Lake Superior was moving northeast, away from the lakes. The U.S. Weather Bureau issued the first of its twice-daily reports at approximately 8:00 a.m.; it did not send another report to Washington, D.C. until 8:00 p.m. This proved to be a serious problem; the storm would have most of the day to build up hurricane-force winds before the Bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C., would have detailed information. Along southeastern Lake Erie near Erie, Pennsylvania, a southern low-pressure area was moving toward the lake. This low had formed overnight so was absent from Friday's weather map. It had been moving northward but turned northwestward after passing over Washington, D.C. The low's intense, counterclockwise rotation was made apparent by the changing wind directions around its center. In Buffalo, New York, morning northwest winds had shifted to the northeast by noon and to the southeast by 5:00 p.m., with gusts of up to occurring between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. In Cleveland, to the southwest, winds remained northwest during the day, shifting to the west by 5:00 p.m., and maintaining speeds of more than . The fastest gust in Cleveland, , occurred at 4:40 p.m. At Buffalo, barometric pressure dropped from 29.52 inHg (999.7 hPa) at 8:00 a.m. to 28.77 inHg (974.3 hPa) at 8:00 p.m. The rotating low continued northward into the evening, bringing its counterclockwise winds in