Federal Asahi departed Toledo on Saturday, bound for Thunder Bay. That pairing, an Ohio port and a Lake Superior destination, puts a saltie on one of the longer straight-line hauls available in the lakes system: south end of Erie all the way to the northwest corner of Superior, with the St. Marys and Sault locks standing between here and there.
Wilf Seymour/Alouette Spirit remains at Midwest Terminals in Toledo as of Saturday's report, holding down that dock alone while the week's traffic thins.
Up at Monroe, Karen Andrie/Endeavour cleared for Indiana Harbor and New York/Double Skin 509A headed for Detroit. Both vessels had arrived at Monroe on Friday, per the 07-10 report, and turned around by Saturday morning. American Mariner also moved, departing Lorain for Calcite, one more vessel pointing toward the upper lakes.
Dorothy Ann/Pathfinder arrived at Amrize in Marblehead on Saturday to load limestone, returning to a dock she has worked repeatedly this week.
Algoma Bear and Herbert C. Jackson both arrived at Sandusky's Norfolk Southern on Saturday; the Cleveland data for the same day is cut off in transmission, so the Sandusky call is what the record confirms.
Baie Comeau arrived at Toledo's CSX dock Saturday to top off coal, then left for Nanticoke. The two-port coal sequence earned its coverage Friday; one sentence is the right measure today.
Lake Ontario leads the system at 3.83 feet above Low Water Datum at Rochester; Lake Erie sits at 3.25 feet at Cleveland. For a limestone carrier working Marblehead on Erie's south shore, 3.25 feet means comfortable channel depth and a full load achievable without draft trimming. Lake Michigan reads 2.40 at Chicago, Huron 2.38 at Harbor Beach, Superior 1.73 at the Sault.
High pressure owns the weekend. Superior is building toward 30.1 to 30.2 inches with three-foot waves; Michigan's high strengthens to 30.2 and holds through Tuesday with one-foot seas. A low pushing east across the Ohio Valley today hands Erie over to high pressure by Sunday, wave heights already at one foot. Huron runs two feet under a shifting high. Saginaw Bay is flat by any working standard.
Steve Hughes, a Marquette native, retires in December as captain of the Paul R. Tregurtha, the longest vessel on the Great Lakes. His father John, a former Northern Michigan University geography professor now 97, used to walk the young Hughes down to the ore docks to watch freighters take on iron ore pellets. Three decades later, Hughes held the wheel of the boat those crowds came to see. He calls the distinction more symbolic than operational, which is exactly the kind of thing a man who grew up watching the boats would say.