Here's the Reserve pulling into Menominee Harbor, under it's own power. Note the grace and majesty of this ship despite the ungainly ad-on self-unloading boom. I've always hated how they converted those old straight-deckers but I understand why they did. It took days to unload one with a dockside Hulett unloader and just hours for a self-unloader to empty her holds.
Anyway, the Reserve is currently having her engines and other systems chopped out and this wonderful website by Dick Lund--which is updated every Thursday--will carry a photo record of the deed in addition to many other Great Lakes ship photographs.
There was a time when the Detroit and St. Clair rivers were the busiest waterways in the world, with a ship traversing them on average of one every seventeen minutes, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, until the lakes froze over in December. And I remember how you couldn't go down by the river and NOT see a freighter or freighters coming or going. Bit now they're almost all gone. Most have been sold overseas and cut up for scrap. many of the rest are in semi-permanent lay-up waiting to be sold for scrap. The shipping industry's almost completely gone and it won't be back. The few jobs left are now done by bigger ships that employ fewer mariners and lack the style and class of the old straight-deck ore boat fleet.
And the Reserve?
Going away, one piece at a time.
These ships are one of the great things about Michigan and the Great Lakes that nobody knows about - our maritime tradition. There is something majestic about watching one of these ships steaming by as you are sitting on the beach on a warm summer night. Superior, Michigan, or Huron - it doesn't matter.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I stayed at the Renaissance Center one weekend last October and I purposely got a room on the River side because I wanted to be able to watch the ore boats go by. (Well, that and Windsor's skyline is much more enjoyable than Detroit's) It's a different perspective watching from the 56th floor!
The best way to watch them is to go to the observation decks beside the locks at Sault Ste. Marie. That is where you can appreciate their size and capacity.
It's sad to think my grandkids might not get to see sights like that. We may have to up there some weekend real soon just to get some video to pass along to them.
Moving from one type of ship to another and sending the old ships to the knacker's yard has always been a sad thing. This has been true for the last 500 years or so.
ReplyDeleteThe difference nowadays is the security risk of losing our merchant fleet altogether. You've got more and more ships that are Nigerian or Libyan flagged and fewer and fewer bearing American flags. We're losing the industrial muscle that is absolutely essential for victory in the event that we suddenly find ourselves thrust into a war of WW1 or WW2 scope and intensity.