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 THE CANAL WATCH DULUTH SHIP CANAL & AERIAL LIFT BRIDGE NEW FRAME EVERY TWO MINUTES, ROUND THE CLOCK |
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Welcome aboard. My name is Donald Fretwell. I spent thirty years in the United States Coast Guard, the last of them on a buoy tender out of Duluth, and when I retired in 1994 my wife Faith and I stayed put. We bought the house in 1990, when I was posted here. It sits on the hillside above Canal Park, and from the front-room window I can see the ship canal, the Aerial Lift Bridge and a good piece of Lake Superior. Since April 1999 a camera in that window has been sending a picture to this page every two minutes, day and night, so the rest of you can watch the boats with me.
Sunday afternoon: that's a thousand-footer coming in under the span, empty and riding high, back from the lower lakes for another load. You'll find her in the log below.
| HOW TO READ THE PICTURE |
| ABOUT THE TIME ON THE PICTURE |
People write to ask why the time stamp looks like a license plate. Thirty years of habit. The camera stamps the time the military way, as a date-time group in Zulu time, which is Greenwich time, the clock every ship and station in the world keeps.
261942Z SEP 99 reads: the 26th, at 1942 (7:42 p.m.) Zulu, September 1999.
To get Duluth time, take off five hours while we're on daylight time, six in the winter. So 1942Z is 1442 here, 2:42 in the afternoon. Faith thinks I could have just set it to local time like a normal person. She's right, and I'm not going to.
| THE HORNS |
You can't hear them on a webcam, which is a shame, because the horns are half of it. As a boat comes up on the piers she blows for the bridge, and the bridge answers with its own horn and starts up. Then, most days, there's a salute: the boat to the bridge, the bridge back, and a good captain will give the crowd on the pier one more for good measure. Kids wave their arms up and down to get it. It works more often than you'd think. The lakers and the salties each have their habits, and after nine years on this hill I can tell some boats by their horns with my eyes shut.
| DECK LOG - WEEK OF 20 SEP 99 |
Times are local here, for the civilians. Names of the lakers as they're painted on the bow; the salties I've logged by flag, since half their names I can't pronounce and the other half I can't spell. I keep the scanner on, so most arrivals I hear before I see.
| DAY TIME | IN/OUT | VESSEL / REMARKS |
| MON 0614 | IN | WELDON C. STRICKLIN. 1000-ft self-unloader, light, for taconite pellets. Wx clear, wind SW 10. |
| MON 1140 | OUT | Saltie, Liberian flag, black hull, loaded with wheat. Atlantic-bound by way of the Seaway. |
| MON 2215 | OUT | ALEX B. SPOTTS. Old straight-decker, pilothouse forward the way they used to build them. Loaded, pellets for the lower lakes. Fine salute. |
| TUE 0750 | IN | Cement carrier, light, for the cement terminal. Gray hull. Gulls following her for no reason I could see. |
| TUE 1530 | OUT | WELDON C. STRICKLIN, down to her marks. In and loaded in a day and a half. |
| WED 0310 | IN | Saltie, Cyprus flag, red hull, light, for grain. At anchor off the piers since Monday waiting on a berth. Slept through her. Saw her on the cam in the morning. |
| WED 1205 | IN | KEITH W. JOHNSTON. 1000-ft self-unloader, light. Fog on the lake, fog signal going, bridge invisible from here for most of an hour. |
| THU 0645 | OUT | KEITH W. JOHNSTON, loaded, pellets. |
| THU 1920 | IN | The buoy tender, home from working the buoys up the North Shore. My old boat. I still stand up when she goes by. Faith has stopped asking. |
| FRI 1100 | OUT | Saltie, Cyprus flag, loaded with wheat. Two days in port. Good-bye and good luck. |
| SAT 0840 | IN | Saltie, Polish flag, light, for grain. Biggest crowd on the pier all week. Warm morning, kids waving. |
| SAT 2140 | OUT | Laker, loaded, outbound. Couldn't make out her name in the dark and the scanner was busy. Bridge lit up nice. |
| SUN 1442 | IN | WELDON C. STRICKLIN again, light. To the lower lakes, unloaded and back in five days. That's her on the cam right now. |
Not logged: the tour boats, sailboats, and the bridge lifts for them. The span went up for pleasure boats nineteen times this week by my count.
| LAKERS VERSUS SALTIES |
| LAKERS | SALTIES |
| Built for the Great Lakes and never leave them. Long, flat, boxy. | Ocean ships. They come in from the Atlantic by the St. Lawrence Seaway. |
| The big ones run about a thousand feet. Those are too long for the Welland Canal locks, so they're stuck above Lake Erie their whole lives, and at the Soo there's only one lock that takes them. | Shorter, because they have to fit the Seaway locks. Next to a thousand-footer a saltie looks like a tugboat's big brother. |
| Modern ones have everything at the stern: pilothouse, quarters, engine. Older ones have the pilothouse up forward. | House aft, with cranes along the deck so they can work cargo in ports that don't have much. |
| Here they mostly load taconite pellets and coal, and many unload themselves with a long boom. | Here they mostly load grain, wheat headed overseas. |
| Named for people, mostly. Flag: U.S. or Canadian. | Flags from all over, crews from all over. You'll see them walking up to Canal Park to use the pay phones. |
| THE SHIPPING SEASON |
The locks at Sault Ste. Marie, the Soo, close for the winter on January 15 and open again on March 25. In between, the lakers lay up in harbors around the lakes for repairs, and the canal goes quiet except for ice. When the Soo opens, the first boat into Duluth in the spring is an event around here. People come down in parkas to see it.
From now through December is the busy end of the year: grain coming in from the fields, the salties in a hurry to get out before the Seaway closes, and the November storms. If you've ever wondered why a retired man watches boats all day, come stand on the pier in a November blow.
| SAVED FRAMES |
The bridge at night with the span down. The floodlights turn it gold. This is the one people ask to have for their computer screens. Go ahead.
Faith gave me the video card for Christmas, and I spent the winter testing the setup before the page went up in April. This is from a cold January morning: sea smoke coming off the open lake, which happens when the air is a good deal colder than the water, and the canal full of ice. No boats. Nothing moving but the steam. I like this one best.
| THE RIG |
My old camcorder on a tripod at the front window, zoomed in on the bridge, plugged into a video capture card in a Pentium II I bought last year. A shareware program grabs a frame every two minutes, stamps it and sends it up here over our second phone line. The camcorder is the best thing that ever happened to it. It never did get used much for birthdays.
Thirty Years in the Coast Guard
where I learned to watch boats in the first place
A word for my wife Faith, who has put up with a marine scanner squawking on the kitchen counter for five years and with me for twenty-eight.
