M A R L I N    B R E E

 

The weather kept changing. I hoped to sail to Canada in a few days, but I quickly learned that I had to be patient because that the lake was in charge of my schedule -- not me. I had sailed up the shore to past  Read More 

Cautiously, I was sailing up the North Shore, always with one hand on my tiller and the other hand very close to the mainsheet. Persistence was a centerboarder and did not have any outside ballast -- no lead mine below to lever me back up. In fact, I had been warned on this matter: " Read More 

In the misty, gray pre-dawn hours, I readied my boat for a long voyage across the tip of Lake Superior and began my trek to follow the Fitzgerald. “Red sky at morning, sailor take warning,” I remembered my sailor’s mantra and looked to the north. Yup. Peering down from beneath the cloud cover  Read More 

You have to be impressed with the ore boat's massive hatch covers -- so heavy at 14,000 pounds each that they require a permanent crane to heft them about and close them. On a clamshell design, which presses them tighter to the hatch coamings, they are massively built and held in place by more than  Read More 

Up north, the big lake is freshening with a sense of urgency that fall is approaching. Go out beyond the breakwaters and you know you have a force of nature beneath you. Careful, mariner! The countdown is beginning now for the annual observance of the last voyage of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I know something  Read More 

The tugboat captain and I were seated in his pilothouse observing a wall of steel sliding past us and out the Superior entryway. It was near midnight and a giant oreboat was going out of the harbor. It was also through this entryway, one of two into the Duluth - Superior Harbor, that the  Read More