you know you look forward to this every day I have an attachment for him I like it I really enjoy the challenge and the working conditions and so forth I think that's why everybody's dead well I started on the Great Lakes and have have been solely on the Great Lakes I started in 1948 as a deckhand on the old United States and gypsum and ice worked my way up in the 1953 I wrote for a license you will go from deck and a deck watch the watchman wheels Minh and their wheels went to the mates license and 1953 and in 1955 I had my first third mates job was on the old diamond alkali and from that time on third made second made first made captain in 1977 I went captain the old David B Thompson it was built in 1977 a Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin we carry it through of 28 people well usually this boat lays up in superior or Duluth Superior Wisconsin or Duluth Minnesota and it's all prepared in the wintertime we started out from Duluth with a load of coal Western coal from Dekker Montana or a Spring Creek Wyoming and we carry it down through the st. Clair Michigan deliver that cargo then go back up in ballast to get another cargo the total journey is about thirteen hundred and forty miles and we carry about 42,000 tons of coal each time at a draught of 26 feet six inches motor vessel st. Clair's it's powered by three general motors Diesel's 20 cylinders each 3,500 horsepower and the fuel consumption at full speed is approximately 7,000 gallons of number two diesel a day no better life I can work six months and take the next six up it's a good life I don't think you have as many young people as interested in this life anymore as there was years ago I know the small town where I came from one time we had like 400 people one of the ships today I don't think there's 40 you have to be a person able to get along with other people because you're confined so much all the time and we have to remember one thing that individuals can't succeed at this you got to work as a unit it doesn't take the captain alone or the or the chief alone or the cook alone it takes everybody to make that thing operate smoothly the three main engines go into one reduction gearbox the main engine rpm is 900 and the gearbox reduces a propeller shaft to 120 rpm and it pushes the boat through the water at approximately 60 miles an hour the first mate is the man responsible for the loading of the discharging of the cargo we haul abouts about 47 cargoes a year probably close to 2 million tons of cargo deliver all this cargo to Detroit Edison utility at Sinclair Michigan and they burn about 30,000 tons a day so there's three ships committed fully committed to the banker plan very little downtime on these ships we keep moving all the time day and night 24 hours a day it takes roughly two days to make the journey down and two days to make the journey back it's about a total of five days with the loading and the unloading and all the work they've built down as we watch this one they work from 12:00 midnight to 4:00 a.m. from 12:00 noon to 4:00 p.m. that same people then they'll go from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. same people then they go from 8 to 12 same the same way come from all over the whole United States the unlicensed crew can work 90 days and get a vacation for 30 days unpaid and then the officers work 60 days and they can take off 20 or 30 whatever is our choice we're in charge of the vessel for the four hour period that we stand each watch I've been sailing since in coming out of high school as chief engineer aboard the boat you're in charge of the main propulsion unit unloading equipment heating and air conditioning and all your electrical control there's and maintenance of all the equipment it's a full-time job depending on how everything runs but there's a lot of scheduling the maintenance and follow-up work on all the different equipment to keep everything running and I have to graduate from high school I went to the Great Lakes Maritime Academy in Traverse City for three straight years and earned my third assistant engineers license and then I went to work for American steamship and have come up through the ranks I've been sailing chief engineer now for four years with American steamship started as a deck end in the early 50s the 50s weren't the best for employment hearing from other people there was employment aboard the Great Lakes and I found my way up to Buffalo next thing I found myself on a very small which the vessels were at that time was under 500 foot long it had just unloaded grain in Buffalo which was the hub of the Great Lakes at that time because the Seaway wasn't completed for large vessels we had very small what they called canal ships that came into the Great Lakes that entered the st. Lawrence Seaway the st. Lawrence Erie wasn't developed until 1960 during the Eisenhower administration to allow larger vessels to enter the Great Lakes my father was a chief engineer with United States Steel and the bodhi was on was the steamer Cedarville and it was traveling through the Straits of Mackinac on a foggy day and was it collided with a foreign vessel before all the personnel could get off the ship it sank and took the lives of 15 crew members and my father was one of them every now and then I think about it out here in the lakes but I still feel secure on these boat it wasn't really a defect in the ball it was a freak accident that happened and unfortunately you know he didn't make it off well that happened I was a 14 years old I was still in high school naturally it changed my life somewhat there I kind of assumed the leadership and the family there of helped my mother and that it was a bad experience but it made a better person out of me the boats are bigger but you're carrying less personnel there's more automation on the boat so the true numbers have been cut nowadays out on the lakes here the Coast Guard has more rules and regulations the company has more rules and regulations although you're not working 24 hours a day with all the different regulations and the rules that you have to comply with I think the stress level has grown a great deal out here in the last 17 years but the engineers are working in the in the lost why married in the meantime and I raised a family of five girls and one boy there is a lot of loneliness to the job in itself there there's quite a bit of loneliness and why I'm saying that being a father of six children we we've missed out an awful lot we've miss out on the birthdays of the children those are the most special events we do miss out on those that's a role and when I did start to say oh we would look forward mainly the Christmas we would get home for Christmas which is not the case any longer my mother never after when I told her I was going to the Maritime Academy she never really expressed openly any dislike for the fact but I think to this day nervous and worries about me being out on the lake but you know she realizes again that there was an accident and not really fault of the ship and we do it year around well as far as navigation goes the winter months curtails are sailing and we just can't operate after it gets so severe that the channels become clogged and heavily packed with ice usually in the engine room you have to people want watch you have a 3 watt system you work four hours on eight hours off in the engine room you're usually looking at eight to nine men and on the conveyer system you have a personnel of three the Lake Superior in the fall is very challenging because it creates some awful storms up here at times but we try to stay out of them usually it provides you with some means of altering your course somewhere to get away from all the real severe weather and hold on occasions you do get caught into it but you try to get out of them if you were a historian you would really appreciate this business because there's so much history up here at this Lake Superior and it goes back so many years even by the time the Jesuits first arrived here that they were it was all trapped out already taught people and whatever so they've been right River Saint Mary's and their River st. Claire and Detroit it is this little beautiful down in through there they're primarily at the Sulak stool acts that are used by vessels the McCarthy Lac and the Pollock any boats that are over approximately 72 feet in width have to use the Pollock such as this motor the st. Clair which is a 92 feet wide entering the lock to leaving the lock it approximately takes one hour and you drop 22 feet they lower you from the Lake Superior level down 22 feet to st. Mary a lower st. Mary's and river level there was the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975 I just happened to be on Lake Superior that day sometimes in November in December when you get the wicked the winds up and Lake Superior and that it makes me a little fearful knowing that you know a family member at one time had been lost at the sea and hearing the different stories but depending on the captain of the vessel and the vessel you're on you usually feel pretty yes secure but everybody has their own beliefs of why it sunk and everything else but he was in a bad predicament that Fitzgerald he had no radar storm and everything else we were way on the west end of the lake there how is Lake sailing different promotions probably the the prime difference is that you're busier the ship is always doing something or you're going in the port or out of board or loading or unloading and we're running into rivers or something there's always got something to do it isn't the same routine stuff every day I think Lake Superior you do experience it never seems to really warm up up there it's such a open lake and wide and long that when the winds blow you realize more of a sea out there so your your chances of having a smooth ride are greater on the lower lakes where you don't have the body of water like you do in Lake Superior the wives are very important part of this and perhaps girlfriends to the women probably have it a lot more difficult than the man because they're not only the mother they're the father and they have to heat the world role running at home they're involved with children until the children are grown up apart whereas the men here on the ship you're always involved with grownups you know and you've got a job to do and you're talking with growing ups all I think that the man has got the easier job of the separation part of it everybody can't do this job because both men and women if they can't stand the loneliness of being away or the separation on occasion we do have women on board ships they have it very difficult because they're mostly confined to themselves although they have to live is like any ship workers know they're not treated any special way it's difficult for a woman to work aboard a ship well we did raise a children there there were three of the boys were involved into the into this industry but one of them has dropped out since last in here they sort of missed that growing up too at the time when those kids were small we were he were gone most of the time he didn't have that time off they missed you they missed the parent the the male parent and I know they did at the time the man is doing a job to try to support a family I'm sure both my grandfather my father enjoyed their jobs for what I can remember him they died when I was at a young age but they nice they would come home and tell stories of what went out on the boat and they seemed to enjoy it and I think that left an impression upon me that it was a good life and I've enjoyed my years of sailing out here and like I say it's a little more stressful but there's still good times and relaxing times that you can enjoy and the beat good people and enjoy it years ago the ships were a lot smaller you say you carried six seven thousand ton today they carry as high as sixty and seventy thousand tons so you're replacing ten ships the potential for advancement is not as great as it was years ago and of course there's a lot of people don't want advance what they want they're stagnated into one position a lot of them don't want to go any higher but there still is room for employment and advancement it runs in spurts though like you'll have a huge retirement at one time and then they'll go for a long period where there's nobody retires the cook is very important because if you got a bad book you got an unsatisfied crew our cook is a very very good cook here we had here they've all been pretty good he spends a lot of time in that galley there he's a retired military man he knows his business waste is a very important item he doesn't do any wasting of anything we got three people in the galley down there there's a second cook who does all the baking 1/4 was a dishwasher and he'd keep their galley clean we have fresh Bigfoots everyday practically all fresh food we buy our stores up in superior Wisconsin so they don't really have to have a lot on hand because we get about every five or six days the ship can be run with about five people we on deck and doing Andrew whereas during the day we have day workers weather usually there's quite a few people around during the day yeah that's it right there there's three mates on the ship the bosun is the is the first mangement right arm he takes care of all of them work on that you see that it's all following through then you've got the engine staff you got a chief before a system engineer one of which is the day worker and he's busy all the time they have three watch standing engineers and they stand the same watch system as we do outside of that there's three Oilers that continually monitor the gauges in the engine room we have a chief conveyor Minh takes care of the unloading of the ship and they have to beat Minh down there the operate gates by a hydraulic system if it dumps into a central point in and out of the boot my left here is the unloading boom this is 250 feet long and it can go from right to position that's at 290 degrees of beam in either side and it's rated capacity is 7,000 tons an hour unloading coal and iron ore we make about 7,500 tons of it requires more education due to the different automation systems to keep the boats running so you know it requires a little more talent and skill than it did years ago the grain makes it in in general I think is the most ideal part of our country it's overlooked by so many people and it really is vital to our whole country it proved itself during World War two when the key amount of iron ore was being lessened for our country there was no way of bringing in the iron ore other than our Great Lakes and our Great Lakes literally made all the tanks that trucks the jeeps the howitzers the you name it for the war effort the Great Lakes area was one of the biggest factors of the industrial part of our country there's been a great many changes since I started in itself but the Great Lakes I think is still going to rebound to come back to whatever we no longer need large crews were disty MERS we had to have firemen to maintain the furnaces we had to have coal pastures to bring the coal out to the furnaces and boiler had a continually oil the engines as they were being run extra deck crews it was a physical job it wasn't an easy job today the modern ship has taken really the labor out of sailing time off on the boat you spend a lot of time reading a lot of times just sitting around thinking to what it's going out of Shore and what you're missing watching TV once in a while there's a poker game or a card game to watch you find different types of relaxation some exercising although it's minimal but other than that is mostly confinement to your room or to someone in the galley talking to somebody the lakes are a beautiful place in the country and it's just the allotment of water to begin with everybody has an attraction to water that's why we're all down on beaches and canoeing and the commercial crafts and waterskiing there it's just an important visit weather-wise this given run and especially Lake Superior its idea it has a right now it's 52 degrees outside and here it is the 19th of July which is probably done in the Detroit area or the Cleveland area where it's 80 to 90 degrees with very high humidity and you can see it's a very pleasant day here on Lake Superior the lower Lakes the Lake Erie with the high humidity and the high temperatures that still really maintains the heat and for you after four hours of standing on a deck your feet really cook inside here it's fine we're an air conditioned vessel and let's do it it's really nice inside I like the history of the lake see a lot of territory meet a lot of nice people transiting the route of different rivers is always different it seems that you always seem to pick up on different things I'll always enjoy it I spend a lot of time out on deck just taking in the scenery especially as you see the seasons change you know there's so many changes along the rivers I always find it interesting to go and travel it in the spring in the fall and in the winter time when it's snowing and the ice on the lakes and that it's it's interesting and amusing to see some of these different things no I really do not miss the boat when I'm off the boat I do not other people might say they do it but my own self I do not miss the boat when I'm off the boat I enjoy my time off our time off infused is whatever manner of person if he has interest in waiting were we do have television aboard the vessel and we have it aboard our own personal room our own televisions or VCRs or whatever have you whatever whatever a person enjoys that this is a very expensive vessel many many millions of dollars invested here it's run by very trained and capable people they're all type of people and the person can go up the ladder as high as it's possible whatever permit it if if you stick with your job you you advance to whatever position you would like of the view of the backward I become attached to the ship there's some of them that always have that soft spot I've just always liked the shipping you know I got like I say I don't know if it's the the Paycheck or just the ship is up but I don't know what I look forward to without that you you
