Great Lakes Shipping History

#101

The Michipicoten is expected to undergo permanent repairs ...

Excellent. She's not gonna be scrapped.

#102

Foggy wrote: ↑Thu Jun 20, 2024 10:08 am
The Michipicoten is expected to undergo permanent repairs ...
Excellent. She's not gonna be scrapped.

Lower Lakes only has 5 self-unloaders (Candian-flagged), and with the Cuyahoga laid up and possibly done for, scrapping another one would not be helpful to capacity.

#103

Still, that's an old ship and will probably crack somewhere else in the not-too-distant future. I know they've inspected her, but all that stuff above about how steel can ripen

and get brittle after so many years of flexing is still true. It will be interesting to follow up on her.

#104

The thread needs some thematic music.

RTH10260 · #105

#106

I like that narrator. Good information, no frills. I hope they can fix her up and get her back in service.

RTH10260 · #107

RTH10260 · #108

#109

That's heavy, man.

A very heavy piece of Great Lakes shipping history relocates back to Sturgeon Bay

Anchors are raised (weighed - Ed.) and anchors are dropped around Door County all summer long, but this anchor raising (weighing) and dropping holds more significance than usual.

That's because it's the historic 1,000-pound anchor from the Oak Leaf, a schooner-turned-barge that had a career of at least 54 years in the Great Lakes shipping industry before it sank off Bullhead Point in Sturgeon Bay in 1928. The anchor is being moved from its previous place of display outside the Eagle Bluff Lighthouse museum in Peninsula State Park to Bullhead Point, a small spit of land jutting into the Sturgeon Bay channel which is now on the National Register of Historic Places as an Historical and Archaeological District.

The Oak Leaf was built as a three-masted, 130-foot-long schooner in 1866 in Cleveland and carried bulk commodities such as grain, lumber and coal across the Great Lakes. It went through several owners, which its listing on the Wisconsin Shipwrecks website says is typical of commercial ships of the day, and conversion to a barge in 1891 that added 30 feet to its length before the Sturgeon Bay Stone Co. bought the vessel in 1906, after which the historical society said it played a significant role in the local stone industry.

The Oak Leaf was abandoned at Sturgeon Bay Stone Co.'s Bullhead Point wharf in 1928, along with stone company barges Ida Corning and Empire State, but the Wisconsin Shipwrecks site says it's not clear when the Oak Leaf went out of service. The site notes the last time it was mentioned as a working stone barge by the Door County Advocate was in 1920, a time when the newspaper frequently reported on the comings and goings of local working ships.