Ice winning the battles in St Mary’s shipping channel
March 27, 08 by TheFleetIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
by Dan Bellerose | Source: The Sault Star
“[Ship t]raffic is moving but it’s moving slowly. . . . We have more ice than resources to deal with it at present and it has slowed movement to a crawl.”
…The ice itself isn’t abnormally thick, but it’s the second-largest ice-cover accumulation in the last dozen years, according to the U.S. National Weather Service, and the difficulty is getting the broken ice to flow downstream rather than congest, Gill said.
Icebreakers are encountering 46 to 76 centimeters (18 to 30 inches) of plate ice throughout the length of the St. Mary’s and up to 96 cm of brash ice.
… Usually, three 660-ton Bay-class icebreaking tugs patrol the lower St. Mary’s during breakout. But only two are available this spring and one of them, the Biscayne Bay, out of St. Ignace, has seen limited duty this week due to propulsion problems.
The Mackinaw was relocating from Whitefish Bay and the upper St. Mary’s to the lower St. Mary’s on Wednesday afternoon to assist the Katmai Bay, out of the Michigan Sault. Its hoped the Canadian Coast Guard light icebreaker Samuel Risley will be downbound from Thunder Bay in the coming days.
Ice congestion in the lower river system has upbound traffic moving in two- to five-vessel convoys, with an icebreaker escort, and three such convoys had moved since Tuesday. But there has been no downbound traffic and five vessels were waiting to move out early Wednesday afternoon.
More to this excellent story at the Sault Star, click to read >>
