Making it Memorable! A Master Salute and Bagpipe Music on the Wilfred Sykes Duluth Departure!

Описание: 2025 Ship Calendar here! https://www.lulu.com/shop/paul-scinoc...

Pictures of the arrival:   / duluthshipphotography  
About this visit:
Their First arrival to the Twin Ports this 2024 shipping season! Arriving Duluth light November 28, 2024 at 07:18 in the cloudy Thanksgiving day morning! Creeping through the Canal at 3.6 Kts, my guess is since they are not all that familiar with the Canal, taking it on the cautious side! They are arriving to load Iron Ore Pellets at the CN dock. They arrived at CN at 08:11 and began loading ore destined for Cleveland OH. 11.2 hours later they finished loading the ore and pulled away from the CN dock. At 20:21 they passed under the Aerial lift bridge with a Master salute, finished off with Bag Pipe Music all the way through the canal! They spend 13 hours in the Port of Duluth for their first visit of the season.

Info on the Sykes and a lot more from lakesuperiorshippingnews.com:
The Wilfred Sykes was built by Inland Steel in 1949 in Lorain, Ohio. At 678 feet long, she was, when launched, the longest boat on the Great Lakes, setting many cargo records in her first year of operation. She received a new paint job just before the 2016 season, hopefully a good sign for her continued work on the Great Lakes.
The Sykes, along with the Edward L. Ryerson and the Joseph L. Block were all initially a part of the Inland Steel fleet, which was founded in 1893 when Philip Block bought the Chicago Steel Works. Joseph L. Block held many high offices in Inland Steel. He was chairman of the board from 1959 until he retired in 1967.
Wilfred Sykes was president of Inland Steel from 1941 until he retired in 1949. Edward Ryerson was president of Joseph T. Ryerson and Sons when it was merged with Inland Steel in 1935. From 1940 until he retired in 1953, he was chairman of the board of Inland Steel.
As for Inland Steel, they were bought in 1998 by Ispat International, a company based in the Netherlands. Another foreign company, Mittal Steel, bought them a couple years later. The Jones Act does not allow foreign companies to operate US flagged vessels and these three boats came along with the rest of Inland Steel when they bought the company.
Like all laws, there are ways to get around the Jones act but it makes figuring out who owns a boat a lot more difficult than it already is. When Ispat bought Inland Steel, the three boats were sold, or loaned or leased to an American Company, Indiana Harbor Steamship Company. Another US company Central Marine Logistics operates the fleet. Apparently, that satisfies the requirements of the Jones Act. (Both companies share the same address in Griffith, Indiana, a port located on the southern end of Lake Michigan, just east of Chicago.)
In 1953, she rescued crew members when the Henry Steinbrenner sank, and she was one of the boats that went out searching for the Edmund Fitzgerald when she sank in 1975.
Captain Dudley Paquette was the skipper on the Sykes on that fateful November day in 1975 when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in Whitefish Bay. The Skyes loaded just opposite the Fitzgerald at the Burlington Northern terminal. Captain Paquette trailed the Fitz but, noticing that his weather charts indicated a ferocious storm on the way, took refuge from the storm at Thunder Bay, and lived to tell his very interesting and provocative story 25 years later. The book,“The Night the Fitz Went Down,” written by Hugh Bishop in 2000, is a very interesting read that was written with the active cooperation of Paquette and details his theories why the Fitz went down.
The Sykes was the first American-built Great Lakes vessel to be built after the Second World War. Her cruising range is 4,500 miles. She has 18 hatches which feed into 6 compartments and can hold 21,500 tons of cargo, the first Great Lakes vessel with that much capacity. She has dual bow anchors of 12,000 pounds each and a stern anchor of 10,000 pounds. She still carries mostly iron ore pellets
Many consider the Sykes to be the first of the modern lakers. She was converted to a self-unloader in 1975 at Fraser Shipyards in Superior and was the first vessel to have it mounted on the stern. Since then, all vessels have the self-unloading equipment