Run west to Marquette

Wednesday, June 7 -- Munising to Marquette (39 miles)

Slept in late and woke to a cold, clear day. Hard to get out of our warm bed! We got underway at eleven running west along the coast to Marquette. This will be the farthest that we travel in Lake Superior, as the forecast this coming weekend isn't good, and we want to be sure to be back in the Soo by next Thursday, when we have flights to NYC. We'll end up cooling our heels in the Soo for a while, but we'll be on the Canadian side this time, which is a good-sized city (72,000), so we should be able to entertain ourselves.

The big attraction for us in Marquette was the iron ore loading dock. This dock is owned and operated by Cleveland-Cliffs, who also run the last remaining mine in the Marquette Iron Range. Iron ore from this range has been mined continuously since 1847, and Cleveland-Cliffs has been the dominant or sole operator since the 1890s. All of the ore is now shipped as concentrated pellets, which started back in the 1950s. We got to see a freighter load with ore while we were here, which was very interesting. 

We were pleased to see that our new Ranger Tug friends Kevin and Denise were also staying at the Presque Isle Marina. You can see their boat (maroon colored hull, no flybridge but a little fake tug smoke stack) near the end of the dock on the right side. We went to dinner in town with them and had a nice visit swapping boat stories. Downtown is a few miles south of the iron ore dock, but the cab ride cost us $20 each way. (They need to get Uber in the UP.) We sat on the deck outside at a Mexican restaurant overlooking Marquette harbor. The cruise ship Ocean Navigator (obviously misnamed) was in town.

When we came back from dinner we found the tug Joyce L. VanEnkevort paired with the barge Great Lakes Trader loading at the ore dock. The train delivers cars full of pelletized ore that drop into hoppers and then the pellets are dropped from the hoppers into the barge using individual chutes. There is clearly a pattern in which chutes they use and how they move the barge along the dock to keep it loading evenly. Old technology but very effective (and very noisy). We sat up on the flybridge with Kevin and Denise to watch for about half an hour. They kept at the loading work until about 11pm, and then quit for the night. We learned from a shipping website that the VanEnkevort/Great Lakes Trader pair just works back and forth between the Marquette ore dock and the Algoma Steel mill at the Soo. 

John has a nice 3-minute video of the loading work which he will share with any interested reader, but we can't figure out how to post it to this blog. 

P.S. Almost forgot to mention that there were two reasons we stayed at the Presque Isle Marina a few miles out of town. One was in the hopes of seeing an ore boat loading, The second was because Kevin and Denise had told us that the marina showers are the best they have encountered in their Great Lakes travels, and they were correct. The shower building had a sign saying it was built in 1971 and it must have had the same shower heads because there was no flow restriction. They ran full blast with all the hot water you could handle. It was great!