October 2, 2024 - Alpena, MI - Wednesday

October 2, 2024 - Wednesday 

Alpena, MI 

We arrived offshore of Alpena ready for a glass bottom boat ride and tour of the NOAA Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center. It is cool and breezy, but quite clear. A few scattered clouds that simply made the sky more interesting and did not impact us. 

Immediately ashore we walked maybe 100 yards and were at the vessel that is taking us out today. The Lady Michigan. We have two captains aboard today. One will be handling the vessel, one will be doing our commentary. Captain Matt is our commentator. He started out with the only reason he was commentating is that he is the only employee that started out as a deck hand and actually remembers the spiel. The usual commentators are college kids and they’ve all gone back to college. There may be a few more days in their season, but we are at the end of the tourism season in this part of the world, and we are seeing signs of it everywhere.

 

Captain Matt starting his presentation

Captain Matt has a great sense of humor and a definite style to his story telling. Heading out into Thunder Bay – a different Thunder Bay than where we were a few days ago – we chug along at a very slow pace which is delightful for the passengers that are sitting on the open-air upper deck. We were part of that group. There were over 70 Viking passengers in the group. 

This is not a file photo. This is my photo.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration established Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary and Underwater Preserve in 2000. It became the thirteenth overall and first on the Great Lakes. I think they also said it is the first freshwater sanctuary. Original boundaries totaled 448 square miles. In 2014 it was expanded to 4,300 square miles. The marine sanctuary contains many shipwrecks. It is believed that there are over 200 wrecks within the Sanctuary. A little over 100 have been located and identified. They range in depth from about 15’ below the surface to 200’. 

We were to see two of the shallower wrecks. The first was the barge Haltiner which sunk in 1929. You can easily identify the boiler and a few other pieces. The 2^nd was the William P Rend. A huge barge. It had a history of numerous bad things happening aboard and several fires. It was refloated at least 3 times, and rebuilt. Finally painted and renamed. Things went fairly well for a number of years. The last voyage, it was loaded with sandstone at Alpena. Cut loose from the dock, they immediately realized that the load was not balanced as within a couple hundred yards, it capsized and sunk. It had been built in 1888 and sunk in 1917. You could easily see the gunnels (side walls).

That is the boiler from Haltiner, sunk in 1929.

Gunnels of the W P Rend

 

The lake is so cold and because it is fresh water, many of the wrecks are very well preserved. If they are close to the surface, the winter ice takes quite a toll. And there is now an invasive species of mussel that is covering the wrecks. The mussels are slowly destroying the wrecks, but they have cleaned up the lake water. 

After returning to shore, we visited the NOAA Great Lakes Maritime Heritage Center. A historian with NOAA gave a lecture on the history of the Center and the Sanctuary. He outlined a number of programs that have been initiated here, particularly working with young people and getting them interested in Marine Science at an early age. He also outlined what Viking is doing to support both the Sanctuary and NOAA.

We returned to the ship for a late lunch. The evening briefing was at 5:30 pm. Tomorrow’s activities were reviewed, then several members of the Expedition Team gave short presentations on their specific area of interest. Very interesting, and short enough to please. 

We had a very light dinner, then went back to the room to relax before going to a Bourbon Tasting at 8:00. 

While we were relaxing, we had a visit from the Head Housekeeper. We had reported that our window was whistling. It had been checked the day before and was better, but it was back to whistling and the cabin stewards noticed it. They had contacted their supervisor, who checked it out and called the Head Housekeeper, who checked it out and called the electrician. They added duct tape as a temporary fix and the whistling was gone. They are to come back tomorrow and try for a more permanent fix. 

The bourbon tasting was nice. We gathered in The Hide. One of the bartenders had set up the tasting comprising four different bourbons. It was amazing how different and how subtle those differences were. The one that a lot of people really liked (and technically it is not a bourbon) was Jack Daniels Sinatra. On this ship it is only available in The Hide and is not on the spirits package. I asked what it would cost and the response was $24 per shot. WOW!

Interesting side note: During our glass bottom boat ride, we could see a spit of land that helps protect Thunder Bay. Matt pointed out that the trees along this spit were all the same height. The spit is about 9 miles long and 4 miles wide. The trees are the same height because after Chicago burned down in 1871, that spit of land was clear cut to provide lumber to rebuild Chicago.