The Berger Family Album

Michigan

Captains Berger Prepare To Take Their Ship

Through the Soo Locks

Ed wrote:

Today we arrive in Sault Sainte Marie. Having been to three county fairs, I could explain to the boys that Sioux or Soo and Sault all sound the same but represent different things. Today we commit the acronym for the lakes to memory. HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. We find a nice camper park near the Soo Locks, offload the bikes, and ride toward the tourist center.

We see a crowd of fishermen along the river bank next to a huge building. We stop and look into the Edison Power Generating Station. The building is about three blocks long and four stories high. We find out that the Electric Company is donating a portion of the basement in the power station to a University Fish Hatcheries Research Program. AS we are peering eagerly through the metal gates, craning our necks to see what is inside, a young lady notes our curiosity and invites us inside. She is working on a project to raise and tag Atlantic Salmon. We get a grand tour of the tanks.

As we step outside after our tour, we watch as fishermen try to snag (really, snag!) salmon with their lures. Of course they are fishing right next to the outlet of the power plant and fish hatchery. They are after fish that were released two years or so ago and are now returning to spawn. We learn that Native American fishermen are allowed to cast a bare hook on a heavy lead sinker out across the water during any time of the year. Everyone else is confined to a specific season. While we are watching, a fisherman hooks a huge, twenty-four inch and hauls it up onto the grass beside the river.

Back on our bikes, we ride over to the Valley Camp. It is a barge that has been converted into a museum. We plunk down our twenty smackers for our family of four and we enter. The museum is filled with tools, machinery, photographs. We ogle at the displays, walk the decks and marvel at the machinery that once powered this coal consuming ginat. We are learning about the lake barges and commerce. We were fascinated by the videos and gnarled remains of the lifeboats from the Edmund Fitzgerald. It was a barge that disappeared into the frigid waters of Lake Superior in 1975. Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about it called "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald".

We bike on down the block and go into the locks area. We are just in time to see a five hundred foot barge enter the lock and be lowered 21 feet. It is unbelievable to see the way these immense ships maneuver through the locks with only inches of clearance on either side. Back at camp we watch the barges ploy the river. We start to learn the navigation signals as we listen to them blow their horns in transit.



Nate wrote:

Locks were invented so boats could go over the waterfalls on the Mississippi River. This allowed people to send their products downstream and receive trade goods from towns below. When you go through a lock, you are lowered or raised by water being taken out or being put into the lock. There are 29 locks on the Mississippi River because there are so many waterfalls. A barge is about 200 feet long and carries the equivalent of 36 semi-truck loads of grain, ore, or lumber. The main shipping lanes run from Lake Superior to Lake Erie.

Alex In Search Of The Big Fish