A Looming Ship

A captain always has to be on his toes, even these days. The traffic on Lake Superior is nothing like it was in the days of my youth, back some 35 years ago. The number of big ships on the Great Lakes is down about 90% since the 1970s, and even fewer of the 10% remaining afloat and working are sailing the Big Lake. So we see hundreds fewer ships out on the lake when we are crossing over to Isle Royale on the Isle Royale Queen IV, our family's passenger ferry, than when I was a teenager working on the Queen II out of Copper Harbor. But there are still foggy days on the Big Lake, and there were many more such days this summer than there have been in the previous 10 to 15 summers because of the cooler spring and early summer in 2008. Here's a shot of a freighter appearing in the fog just a half mile from the Queen IV one day when I was captain and ferrying a large load of people across to the national park. My position was about 10 miles northwest of Copper Harbor. I had to "turn down" on the ship as we say. That means I had to alter my course to port to keep out of the ship's way. I stayed a healthy distance away, and finally when I was fully behind the ship and got within a half mile, the ship began to appear in the fog. Within another 5 minutes the Queen IV had emerged completely fom the fog bank that hugged the Kerweenaw coast on that day, but the frieghter kept on going east into the denser fog off Keweenaw Point.