• Saturday-What'sUP June 20 - 01:56 pm

Dennis Kemper was enjoying an evening at the Hancock Beach Campground when he spotted a freighter sailing through. Normally the biggest boat you'll see on the Portage Canal is the Ranger III, at 165 feet, so witnessing the 636 foot American Courage on the waterway is an uncommon occurrence. According to Ed Chaput (Eddyfitz), this boat was traveling from Duluth to Marquette where it was to load up there and continue on to Toledo, Ohio and then back up to Superior, Wisconsin. My search of Boatnerd.com was unsuccessful in finding out where in this journey, the American Courage is right now. Any boat watchers out there in Pasty Land that can give us an update on her whereabouts?

We see, of course, a lot of freighters go through the Detroit River from downtown Detroit and Belle Isle. One early morning we took a ride out to Belle Isle and a freighter was coming through and we thought a couple of small boats of people fishing was going to flip over from the waves.

It looks like it's in Lake Linden on Boatnerd.

That must have been very cool to see!

I doubt it's in Lake Linden because it would have had to go all the way around to get there. It would have gone past Dreamland, though, to reenter Lake Superior at Jacobsville.

Just checked the Boatnerd.com site and it shows due to the slow economy the AMERICAN COURAGE is now in lay-up in Sturgeon Bay, Wi. I sailed for this company years ago on a ship similar in size but it was one we who grew up in the KEWEENAW Peninsula were more familiar with i.e. front and back cabins.
As a young 18 year old kid I was able to sail into 44 great lakes ports aboard 3 different ships, including some small towns as Port Washington, Wi..Silver Bay, Mn, Gary, In..Grand Haven, Mi...Huron, Oh and up thru the Welland Canal to Oswego, N.Y and Toronto, On. all this while getting paid!!!!!!!!
Freighters such as these can be still be boarded and viewed as the SS VALLEY CAMP museum ship at the Soo.

I was on board Keweenaw Star for a pre-wedding sunset cruise that night. We sailed under a fully raised Portage Lake Lift Bridge and passed American Courage as it made its way toward the bridge.

Needless to say, several people aboard the Star took photos of the encounter. Here are some of mine on a public Picasa photo gallery:

http://tinyurl.com/nqqcob

Found it on YouTube the other night
What's up with this site? It won't even let you post a link to You Tube now?

Anyway, if you go to You Tube, type in the search box- Keewenaw, hit relevance, then newest, you'll see a video of the vessel passing under the Portage Lift Bridge.

Excite Able (Exciteable):
"What's up with this site? It won't even let you post a link to You Tube now?"

Well, that's 'cuz, as you may know, it is not too difficult to find content on YouTube that may be inappropriate for this site.

However, as you say, if you go to YouTube and use the search box you can find an abundance of suitable content, some real gems, even.

Using Keweenaw as a search term will find hours of video tours of old mine structures, bike trips on back trails, fall color tours and more.

There are more videos — nominally lost to eternity by virtue of their author's unfortunate inability to spell Keweenaw(!) — that may be found by use of Keewenaw (sic) as a search term. Included are some Radio Control Airplane Video Flights. They're not exactly military "Predator" drones, and nowhere near the quality of E. Neil Harri's in flight videos, but potentially of some interest.

The biggest problem in perusing these YouTube videos is the huge investment in time it'll take to find the gems among the vast quantities of chaff.

I found the 'Keweenaw' videos on You Tube. The ones we watched were pretty interesting.