On a distant northern sea....

Self-described "railfan/boatnerd" Pete Jensen reports via the YooperRails mailing list that the shipping season has begun for Marquette's lower harbor. (The first freighter docked in the upper harbor on Saturday the 27th.)

I miss living on Lake Superior and watching it change through the seasons. I can remember watching for the first laker of the season to arrive, and wondering what it would have been like to live there before the coming of the railroads, when the place was almost totally isolated from the fall freeze-up to the spring thaw. I once spent a substantial part of a March afternoon standing on Presque Isle and watching a Coast Guard cutter break its way through the ice to free an oreboat whose captain had been a little too eager to be the first ship of the season. (I think it was the Saginaw, but I can't recall for certain.)

I guess the Detroit River is only about an hour's drive away from here, with several times the ship traffic than Marquette sees, but it's not the same as being able to see them from my front window and casually walk down to the waterfront any time I felt like it.

I will admit, though, that the webcam of the Great Lakes Maritime Institute on the Detroit waterfront is one of the coolest I've ever seen. It's mounted on top of a dethroned oreboat pilothouse, and can be remotely controlled to scan up and down the river for passing boats or anything else of interest. Apparently they funded it by auctioning off, among other things, a couple of bottles of 90-year-old Scotch that spent most of the last 70 years in a shipwreck on the bottom of Lake Huron.