The August count for the Saginaw River is in: 20 commercial vessel passages, 12 docks receiving cargo, 31 product deliveries once split loads are tallied separately. For anyone watching from this shore, those numbers fall below every benchmark on the board. The 5-year average is 22, the 10-year is 23, the 15-year is 21, and the 20-year is 25. August 2026 did not clear any of them. The closest call is the 15-year average, one passage away, and the river did not get there. It also came in one below August 2025.
The arithmetic is plain: 21 passages would have been enough to match at least one long-term mark, and the river fell one short of that. Twelve docks receiving 31 deliveries works out to an uneven spread, as it always does, a few busy slips and some that saw boats only occasionally. The river was not idle. It simply was not busy enough to catch its own history.
New York/Double Skin 509A was still unloading at Michigan Paving in Monroe as of Wednesday's report. Whatever she came in with, she has been giving it up slowly.
In Cleveland on Wednesday, Wilfred Sykes arrived at the Cliffs stone dock and Victory I came in at Dock 28W at the Port. Outbound, Walter J. McCarthy, Jr. headed for Two Harbors and Algoma Buffalo cleared out with salt.
In Toledo, CSL Niagara arrived to top off coal at CSX and departed for Nanticoke. Federal Caribou arrived at The Andersons. Albert/Margaret weighed anchor and shifted to George Gradel to load gasoline.
At Sandusky, Clyde S. VanEnkevort/Erie Trader arrived at the Norfolk Southern coal dock on Wednesday.
Ontario leads the board at 3.48 feet above Low Water Datum at Rochester; Erie follows at 3.13 feet at Cleveland, giving vessels on that run workable draft room going into fall loading. Lake Michigan sits at 2.04 feet, Huron at 1.78 feet, and Superior at 1.72 feet at the Sault. None of these readings touch extremes, but Superior's 1.72 is the floor to keep in mind as western ore ports begin setting autumn loads.
A sluggish cold front is dragging through the region and refusing to commit. Huron has trailing thunderstorms and a muggy air mass tonight; any vessel threading the Straits of Mackinac works through that same heavy air before the front fully clears. A Wilfred Sykes bound out of Cleveland into a 2-foot Lake Erie chop has the same unsettled picture until the ridge clears that lake Friday. Superior is the steadier run: a Manitoba high builds toward 30.0 inches through Friday with wave heights holding at 2 feet. Michigan is running 1-foot seas.
On Tuesday, September 1, the Keweenaw Historical Society accepted a framed original painting by Upper Peninsula artist Clyde Mikkola depicting the wreck of the City of Bangor. The ship ran aground near Copper Harbor during a November 1926 storm while carrying new automobiles from Detroit, and the winter salvage of those cars from a grounded freighter is the kind of story that earns a painting. The society's maritime chairman Mark Rowe received it. The source describing this as a '100th anniversary' commemoration notes a November wreck date, which puts the actual centennial two months from now; the painting is in the right hands for when that date arrives.