I’ve been to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum and Lighthouse on Whitefish Point. You cannot be there and not hear Lightfoot’s haunting words and melody in your head.
The “Maritime Sailor’s Cathedral” is actually Mariners’ Church of Detroit; been there too.
Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, Lightfoot has changed a word in that verse after receiving a complaint from a parishioner that the church was not musty. Lightfoot now sings of the “rustic old hall”.
mmm
Lots of great evocative imagery in that song. One I haven’t seen mentioned yet:
“That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early.”
I looked them up. They use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. So the building may not be musty, but their theology certainly is.
Maybe he can combine musty and rustic.
*
“In a rusty old hall in Detroi-it they prayed…”*
mmm
truly one of Gordon Lightfoot’s best songs and that’s saying a lot
I don’t think so. I crossed Lake Michigan on the Milwaukee Clipper ages ago and there was quite some time that neither shore was visible.
Qadgop pointed that out, too.
…
Nope, I’m not on BoatNerd. When something of interest comes into or is due to come into port, I check it out on AIS based www.marinetraffic.com. Being a transportation hub since the fur trade days, if something interesting happens in the port, it makes the local news, e.g. first ship in, last ship out, icebreaker schedule, new crane, volume shipped, etc. South of here, Duluth Shipping News keeps track of what is going in in the Duluth/Superior port – if you find yourself down that way, I guarantee you would enjoy poking about the William A. Irvine in Duluth and the whaleback Meteor in Superior. The Duluth Train Museum is also well worth visiting. Rail to bring the ore from points northwest to Duluth and to bring grain from points west to TBay. Ships to move the ore to steel plants down lake and grain to Europe. That’s a big piece of how the USA and Canada prospered tremendously in the 20th century.
You made me double-take when you mentioned touring Valley Camp. To me, Valley Camp is a small rough industrial bungalow at the south end of the port, marginally large enough to have a dozen or so people meet in it’s main room. It’s about as interesting as a . . . well, I can’t think of anything interesting about it (except for the role it played in building our economy, in which case is it very interesting although physically nondescript).
It is surrounded by road and rail tracks and big piles of road salt. When the Canadian Pacific Railway connected the east to the west of our country, they built a transshipping facility called the Fort William Coal Dock at the south end of the harbour, which is presently owned by Valley Camp Terminals Inc. (Valley Camp is a coal conglomerate that at one time or another has had its fingers in mines and everything you need to ship coal.)
Here’s hoping that you win one of the lotteries (and that your quarters are toward the bow rather than above the engines). I’m wondering if you could arrange to conduct a shipboard health study or heath/wellness program of some sort that would get you onboard for a while each year? One of the challenges for crew is access to pretty much anything, for most of the time they are not in port, and when they are in port the goal is to get unloaded/loaded and leave port as quickly as possible – typically a turn-around of a couple of days or less.
The job on the Algoway was a good experience – just a summer job for me during university, not a career, for being isolated on a ship for most of the year for my entire career would not be appealing. Being out on the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence, day after day after day, was wonderful! Out toward Sept Isles the scenery was gorgeous. I can see why some folks like inshore cruises. I was the night cook, so I had all the time in t the words during the days to sit on deck and read, while watching the world slowly pass by. Some of the crew were really nice folks – particularly those from Newfoundland who were regular guys with families back home. The cook and assistant cook (spouses) were welcoming. Since we were all literally living on the job, is was good that we enjoyed each other’s company.
Yes, there were some oddballs who simply did not have the social skills to thrive in a larger community, but all were good souls. My bunkmate freaked out and started raging at me because he believed that I had taken all the nudie photos out of my Omni magazine. Think about that one for a second. At the other end of the ship, the first mate had so many porn magazines that they were stacked to the ceiling throughout his cabin – hundreds of them in a cabin that was only big enough for a single berth, a modest desk, a locker and a head. Several of the crew were fall down drunks, which was a health and safety issue, and had directly led to my being hired.
The fellow whom I had replaced had fallen between the pier and the freighter while trying to climb on board up a tall extension ladder after returning from a night of heavy drinking. His drinking buddy was so soused that rather than notify anyone of the death, he simply climbed the ladder himself, went to his bunk, and passed out.
The lack of attention to safety was telling. For example, the boat (Great Lakes freighters are ships, but they are commonly referred to as boats, as in “working on the boats.”) was a self-unloader, meaning that there was a large conveyor belt in the bottom of each of the holds. Ore, potash, grain etc. in a hold would gravity feed onto the conveyor. Once a hold was mostly empty, crew would clip into chains, stand on the top of the remaining pile, and shovel it down toward the conveyor. When they slipped, being clipped into a chain prevented them from falling onto the conveyor, which could be deadly. (I had previously had a blast working in a mine’s mill, but I never want to work beside or under an operating conveyor again – too dangerous). Now here’s the thing – the chains were severely rusted, and on a couple of occasions they broke, through fortunately with no ensuing falls onto the conveyor, but the company only replaced the broken one rather than all of them.
A couple of years earlier, a bulk carrier had burned on Superior, killing seven, so safety concerns were a hot topic of discussion. Several of the burned freighter’s crew had been able to escape from portholes. Our ship’s portholes were to small for normal sized people to fit through. Discussions followed about whether it would be better to install larger portholes, or if larger portholes would be more subject to failure during storms. We didn’t have the qualifications to know one way or another, but the company’s refusal to replace all the rusted safety chains did not fill us with confidence.
At a gut level we believed that if a ship is burning or sinking, (1) there’s a good chance that you’re going to have to get off of it in fairly short order prior to help arriving, (2) in rough water you can not count on making it into a lifeboat or a life raft, and (3) that even with a PFD on, you’re not going to last long wearing regular clothes when in the water offshore in Superior because the water is very cold (sometimes triggering mammalian dive reflex and always accelerating hypothermia).
Our boat was not unique in our concerns, for crews throughout the system were giving a lot of though about safety following the Cartiercliff Hall fatalities. Our union (the Seafarers’ International Union – SIU) took up the various safety issues with the shipping companies who employed their members, but the discussions were not as productive as we had hoped.
To move things along, we stopped moving things along. Another fellow and I were the crew’s representatives for the wildcat – my crewmate had a lifetime of experience and the respect of the crew, and I could read. The captain asserted that it cost the company $50,000 per day for each day that we would be tied up. I have no idea if that figure was correct or if he was bluffing us, but he under protest he permitted us to tie up at the downstream end of the Welland Canal system.
A negotiator from the SIU came onboard once we were tied up, which was a relief to me and my crewmate. A couple of hours later, two young lawyers from one of Canada’s top corporate and commercial firms arrived. One of them read out a section from the Criminal Code and said we would be charged with mutiny. The SIU negotiator called bullshit and told them that they didn’t know what they were talking about. They then told us that we should call our lawyers. I asked them to call my lawyer, and handed them the business card of one of my friends, who just happened to be one of the top five senior partners in their firm. The young lawyers left, and the next morning the company promised more safety drills and promised to replace the chains, but refused to provide survival suits due to the costs.
A few days later when we made port in Thunder Bay, I asked the captain for my pay, signed off of the ship, and went poking about the twin cities where I now make my home. Aside from port-side public tours of historic freighters in Duluth, I have not been on a freighter since. It’s a busy harbour and shipyard that we paddle, sail an motor about in, so there’s some interaction (e.g. a sexy octogenarian on my outrigger crew shouting up to a fellow on a freighter at anchor a few kilometers out from the break-wall “Hey, Sailor, looking for a good time?” and frequent brief conversations along side salties about where they are from and where they are going).
As far as the survival suits go, Algoma Central Marine has outfited its freighters for years with survival suits, but I don’t know when they started doing that. Whether our wildcat helped push the company forward on that issue or not, I don’t know, but I hope it did. And yes, I put my money where my mouth is, for I have been using my own dry-suit and rescue PFD for decades when I’m out and about in cold wet stuff.
That was a very interesting read, Muffin. Thanks!
As for the Valley Camp, the ship’s living and working quarters may have been small, and it certainly was a tiny boat in comparison to others that have plied the great lakes. But the huge cargo area inside was turned into a wonderful museum, with different displays about the great lakes and shipping and industry and history every 10 to 15 feet, on 3 different levels. And they had a lifeboat on display from the Edmund Fitzgerald there, salvaged from the lake after the sinking. Seeing that sent a chill down my spine. Plus the bow end of the cargo area turned into a huuuuge art gallery too. An amazing amount of history/technology/sailor life on display.
I hear you about portholes! My father used to scuba dive on Lake Michigan wrecks back in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, including the Atlanta, which sank in 1906, and rests on the bottom now, barely a mile from me. This account tells of how a cook was rescued from the burning, sinking ship by pulling him through a porthole, tho the process cost him some skin. An interesting, if rather deprecating description is below:
Otherwise I’ve enjoyed reading Dwight Boyer’s books about life on and around the Great Lakes. So I’m truly happy that you’ve shared your adventures with us here!! 
The next time I drive through the Soo (late May or early June 2019), I’ll pop across the border and spend some time on the Valley Camp – it sounds fascinating! I spent a few hours at the bush plane museum on the Canadian side about a decade ago and I’d like to see it again, so between the two museums I’ll just have to add a day onto the trip.
Now that brings back a teenage memory. Some teenage friends and I were spelunking on the Niagara Escarpment (it runs north from Niagara Falls up to the peninsula that delineates Lake Huron from Georgian Bay – if you ever get an opportunity to sail either Georgian Bay or the North Chanel, take it, for the scenery is quite lovely with all the bays and islands with little development) when I was trying to squeeze through an egress that none of the other guys could squeeze through. I made it at the cost of a bit of skin from each hip, along with my pants and underwear. What I had not been counting on was the group of Girl Guides hiking along the trail beside the opening just as I emerged. Friends being friends, the guys down below refused to hand up my pants, leaving me trying to hide myself by pulling down on my T-shirt while the women laughed.
Good stuff. I sailed for a short time on oceangoing ships. Later as a design engineer I rode various lakers doing surveys for their owners for future conversions. Definitely a different environment in some ways.
One other safety factor (or lack) in most lakes ships, self unloaders, or ‘straight deck’ including Fitzgerald, is no watertight subdivisions in the hold. If the hold gets breached, from whatever side (in Fitzgerald it could been a floating tree washing over the deck, wiping off hold vents, hatchway collapsed [like in the song], ship hits bottom hard in a big wave in a shallow part, etc) and water comes in too fast for the bilge pumps to cope with, the ship is going down. Some modern oceangoing bulk carriers aren’t built to an absolute ‘one compartment standard’ (=any one compartment can flood and ships remains afloat) either, but generally one hold flooding will not sink them.
OTOH that obviously doesn’t happen very often. Re marine traffic, great site. If you view the live traffic map of Superior on windy days this time of year you’ll see a lot of the traffic hugging the north shore, generally windward shore, to avoid the biggest waves, or days where the lake is basically empty, all traffic holding in ports waiting for conditions to improve.
Newer merchant ships virtually never have portholes below the main deck level, no difference of opinion there among designers: another place for water to get in and a structural discontinuity. Then again they don’t have crew quarters below the main deck anymore either.
Back when I was involved, Algoma had a reputation as more aggressive and perhaps less ‘refined’ company than Upper Lakes Shipping or Canada Steamship Lines among the then three big Canadians. Algoma bought ULS a few years ago. The Canadians are now bringing in new lakers built in China and getting rid of older ones like Algoway. Years back that was effectively prohibited. On the US side it’s still prohibited by the Jones Act, so US owners dealing with US construction cost 3-4 times those in China just don’t build new ships (OTOH their business between US ports is protected from Canadian or other foreign competition, again by the Jones Act). No all new big lake ships have been added on the US side in ~35 yrs, though a couple of all new big tug/barges have, and other old ships have been converted to barges, plus improvements in old ships like new engines, etc. The US contemporaries of Algoway (the 2nd, built in 1972) aren’t going anywhere for the foreseeable future except to the extent the fleet shrinks further.
Thanks for a terrific post, Corry El. Very informative!
Yeah! Thanks Corry El. That was fascinating.
When I toured the Mather in Cleveland SS William G. Mather (1925) - Wikipedia one of the things they’d done was cut a large opening into the hold from the manned spaces just below the deck house. So you’d be standing in this well-lit 2-story compartment full of museum display cases and stuff while lurking behind you would be this gigantic multi-hundred foot long dimly lit cavern of rusty steel. The sides & bottom sort of faded to black in the distance.
The fact that most of that vast unsegregated compartment was below the water line gave me the willies just tied up to a dock. Thinking about riding that beast through a gale in November or any other time of year is sobering to say the least. Talk about brittle failure modes. :eek:
If I imagine what the last few seconds of my life will be like staring into the eternal abyss, it feels about like looking into that hold. :shivers:
It’s that time again - Today is the 44th anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
StG
I rang our bell along the shore of Lake Michigan today for the Fitz.
I’ll do it again, but 33 times for the Carl D. Bradley on November 18th. It sunk on the other side of the lake and a bit north of me.
The ore freighter floating museum in Saulte Ste. Marie, MI has a lifeboat from the the Fitz that was retrieved after the sinking, on display. That, and the bell at Whitefish Point both sent chills up my spine
The Linda E, out of Port Washington, WI is the last commercial vessel lost with loss of crew on Lake Michigan, that I’m aware of. A fishing boat with 3 men on it, it was apparently driven underwater by a barge which didn’t notice it. The men were working below on their catch and didn’t see it coming. She went down December 11, 1998. I should mark that day with my bell, too.
Thanks for remembering, StGermain. Never want to forget the Fitz.