The SS Badger is not crossing today. Lake Michigan Carferry cancelled both Tuesday runs, the 9:00 a.m. departure from Ludington and the 2:00 p.m. out of Manitowoc, citing forecast gales and waves of 10 to 16 feet with isolated crests near 21 feet. That is not a number a carferry argues with.
The warning covers Lake Michigan through 1:00 p.m. CDT on the northern third, with isolated gales possible beyond that. Lake Huron is flying its own warning through this afternoon, a 29.30-inch low tracking across northern Ontario and pushing gusts to gale force across the central and northern reaches. Six-foot seas are the current call there.
Lake Superior has its own low, 29.3 inches over Manitoba, moving toward southern Hudson Bay by afternoon. The Gale Warning there runs from 8:00 a.m. EDT to 4:00 p.m. EDT, with 3-foot-plus seas reported. Through all of that, Sunda is running the downbound leg from the Keweenaw toward the Soo, last fixed at 2:12 a.m. with an ETA of 3:26 p.m. She will earn her berth today.
Paul R. Tregurtha, the laker we tracked through the Straits on Saturday, pushed upbound through Grassy Island early Tuesday with an ETA at Port Huron of 7:42 a.m.; Cleveland reported her arrival with ore for the Bulk Terminal on the same morning, so she made the river run on schedule.
Herbert C. Jackson departed Toledo for Saginaw with coal on Monday, which puts her somewhere in Lake Huron today. Bay City-area watchers may want the binoculars handy by this evening.
At Marblehead, Ohio, Manitoulin loaded limestone at Amrize and cleared the dock Monday morning with no updated destination filed; Dorothy Ann/Pathfinder moved straight to the berth once the slip was free.
Kingsville, Ontario took a limestone call Monday: Undaunted/Pere Marquette 41 arrived for Southwestern Sales Co., a small-port movement worth noting on a day when the big lake is keeping most vessels honest.
Lake Erie sits at 2.73 feet above Low Water Datum at Cleveland, the highest reading on the board today, and Lake Ontario is at 3.12 feet at Rochester. Both southern lakes are calm enough to run: Erie is showing 2-foot seas and no warning. Lake Michigan is at 1.57 feet above datum at Chicago, Lake Huron at 1.62 at Harbor Beach. Neither figure is generous for a deeply laden boat, and the gales are not helping anyone try to find out where the bottom of the draft margin is.
Three of the five Great Lakes are under Gale Warnings Tuesday. Superior clears by 4:00 p.m. EDT. Huron's warning lifts this afternoon. Michigan's southern two-thirds warning ended by 7:00 a.m. CDT; the northern third holds through 1:00 p.m. CDT. Erie and Ontario are the exception: a warm front lifts north over Erie today before a cold front crosses tonight, but current seas are running only 2 feet on both lakes. Deck-chair watchers on Saginaw Bay should expect a hard chop on northern Huron with conditions easing into evening.
A life ring from the SS Milwaukee turned up at a rummage sale, almost a century after the railcar ferry went down in Lake Michigan on October 22, 1929, with 52 people aboard and no survivors. The Milwaukee ran for the Grand Trunk Milwaukee Car Ferry Company between Milwaukee and Grand Haven. The recovered ring is now in the hands of the Society for the Preservation of the SS City of Milwaukee, whose museum ship sits permanently in Manistee. On a day when gales are closing the same lake to a modern carferry, the Milwaukee's ring is a plain reminder of what this water can do.