Fourteen knots and a few hundred miles of Lake Michigan remain before the next stop. Come aboard a Great Lakes freighter with cadet-in-training Taylor Brown for a look at life on the fresh seas.
text and photos by Taylor Brown, featured in Traverse Magazine
Cadets get assigned to two commercial sea projects during their time at the Great Lakes Maritime Academy. The summer of 2018, I was assigned the Great Lakes .
once the ice melts, the 1,004-foot Edwin H. Gott never sleeps in her avocation to carry the most cargo on the lakes. I joined her downbound at the locks in Sault Ste. Marie .
After climbing a apparently endless ladder, I met the gang out on pack of cards. For the following calendar month, I shadowed the Third Mate, learning everything about his speculate I could. For two shifts a day we would stand a navigational watch on the bridge or be out on deck as we pulled into or departed a bobtail.
The company routinely sends the ship between Two Harbors, Minnesota, and Gary, Indiana. Two Harbors is a sleepy town just north of Duluth. queerly enough, it ’ mho where Sticky Notes were beginning invented. And it ’ south where iron ore pellets make their way from the surrounding rough hills into the bellies of giant ships whose boxlike steel bodies outlast any seawater ship .
evening as the hull was pelted by waves as we left port, the gemini 10,000 horsepower engines never seemed to mind. Get into adult adequate seas and look down the tunnel, and you ’ ll see the steel distortion and moving the burrow up, down, left and good. “ That ’ second normal, ” I ’ meter tell, as I remember I ’ ll be sleeping on this flexible monster.
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Being a cadet is a fishy part of any mariner ’ south career. You ’ re tidal bore to prove yourself as competent, however lacking the experience needed to provide any real operational value to the ship—this international relations and security network ’ t to say I ’ thousand wholly useless ; I ’ ll drop anything to make a intend cup of coffee for the Captain.
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Cadets need to get trips in on all five Great Lakes, arsenic well as the Detroit, St. Clair and St. Marys rivers. I was lacking in my Detroit and St. Clair trips and exhausted June 2018 completing them on the State of Michigan, the Academy ’ s training ship. Soon it was the 4th of July, and to celebrate, the embark placed itself in Buffalo, New York. The harbor was packed with boats awaiting the firework. I ’ megabyte normally at West End Beach in Traverse City taking photos, but this night I was tasked with aisle watch. Confident the ship wasn ’ thyroxine going to be invaded by Buffalonians, I snuck away to take the shoot below .
Authored by Taylor Brown
Taylor embrown graduated in May from the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City. He ’ sulfur now a civilian merchant marine military officer licensed to work aboard commercial ships on the Great Lakes and oceans. Follow his adventures on Instagram at @ tayderbrown
