ALPENA — A little boat that putts around in circles in Alpena keeps industry rolling on the Great Lakes.
The tug Manitou, captained by owner David Malcolm, visits Alpena each winter to make sure freighters and barges can reach Lafarge Alpena’s giant storage bins to pick up loads of cement, to be used in building the things that build the country.
Last weekend, as it has for decades, the Manitou chugged in slow-motion loops around the Lafarge harbor, the boat’s bathtub-shaped sides and angled bow climbing onto and breaking into panes the inches-thick ice that could stop a bigger ship in her tracks.
“These hulls are beautiful hulls. Great for breaking ice,” said Malcolm, who has worked the tug since his father bought and refurbished the Manitou, which originally served as a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker in New York in the 1940s.
Everybody knows everybody on the Great Lakes, Malcolm said, chatting easily over a hand-held radio with the captain of the tug Samuel de Champlain, pushing the barge Innovation toward Lafarge with empty holds last week for the barge’s last visit of the season.
An hour and a half before the Innovation’s arrival, Malcolm and his crew of two headed into Thunder Bay, which a sharp wind had covered with 4-inch-thick ice the night before.
Hunks of ice spun off over the frozen water as the Manitou’s bulk forged forward, the ice crunching and snapping and sliding in blue-white sheets like recalcitrant puzzle pieces at the ship’s approach.
Buoys mark a channel designated for Lafarge-bound boats. Malcolm deftly steered his ship through the channel to make sure the larger ship would reach its destination without getting stuck.
All would be well, Malcolm said, as long as the wind didn’t blow the broken ice together again too quickly.
In front of the hulking Lafarge buildings, Malcolm looped through the ice again and again, crushing large ice chunks into smaller ones.
Gliding sideways, he scraped the bow of his ship along the walls of the loading slip, where no ice could be left to separate the Innovation from the precise mechanical arms that would dump cement into 18-inch-wide hold openings.
Below, chief engineer Rich Malcolm and deckhand John Woehlert peered out the windows of a small room where a bare table and a stove serve as kitchen and dining room for the crew that sometimes works for weeks at a time.
A few tiny bedrooms feature tiny sinks and barely enough room to turn…
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