Watching the Ojibway Sail By

 The next ship is the ship I wanted to catch.

She was about a half hour behind the Tregurtha and that gave me plenty of time to catch her.  The only problem is that it was a kind of a warm night and this is where the heat haze was less pronounce.

The Ojibway was heading down from Thunder Bay and she was carrying a load of grain.

She was heading to Sorel, Quebec which is about about 50 miles to the northeast of Quebec on the St. Lawrence River.

I think Sorel may be a trans shipment point where another ship will pick up the grain to take it overseas.

The Ojibway of course will not be that ship.

I also think grain shipments have been pretty steady for the past couple of year.  In fact, I think it helped prevent a complete collapse of Great Lakes shipping last year.

Based on the ships I've been seeing, I think Great Lakes shipping seems to be bouncing back.  But I wont really know until I see the numbers at the end of the year.

There are still a few ships that are in layup.  The Cason Callaway and the Philip Clarke are still laid up.  I'm not sure when they are coming back out.

The John G. Munson just left Sturgeon Bay to head to Calcite to pick up her first load of stone.  As I type this, she is heading up to Duluth and may have just passed through the Locks.

The Blough is still awaiting her fate but I have a feeling they are going to fix her.

I'm not sure what ships are still laid up for the Canadians but again it doesn't seem like many.

And then I switched to my droen.

I think I'm getting the hang of flying it.  I am also thinking I want to get one of the next ones up.  My one complaint about my drone is that I can't fly it well when it is windy outside.  But that is okay, I don't want to get too dependent on it.

One of the cool things about the Ojibway is that she was built in my home town.  I hope that the local maritime history group will be able to get their hands on her when she retires.

Even though she is a straight decker, that may be a while.  I'm pretty sure she sports a newish engine.  And I think they had to some other things when she transitioned from an American ship to a Canadian ship.

At any rate, she continues on her way.  If I remember correctly, she would be about two days to her destination.  It was about two days from her origin to this point which makes it roughly a 4 day journey.  It is one of the longer trips on the Great Lakes.