Saginaw River Rear Range Lighthouse

As we patiently wait for the start of the 2026 shipping season, here are a few shots of the Saginaw River Rear Range Lighthouse that I took on 3/2/26.  The snow is gone, but there is still ice on the Saginaw River. 

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 6

     Arriving on the Saginaw River in June of 2023, the Great Lakes Towing tug, North Dakota, kept herself busy during the 2025 season, assisting vessels on 32 different occasions, including much icebreaking during the month of December.  

-        The saltwater vessel BBC Ukraine became the first and only saltwater vessel to visit the Saginaw River in 2025 from overseas, calling on the Port Fisher Terminals Dock in Bay City to unload industrial equipment for a local business project.  BBC Ukraine arrived on December 1^st.

-        On September 10^th, Defiance/Ashtabula arrived on the Saginaw River and was assisted to the Port Fisher Terminals Dock by the tug North Dakota.  The pair arrived for repairs to their bow thruster and departed early morning on 9/12/25, again assisted by North Dakota.  They did not deliver a cargo on this trip.

     As always, the shipping industry continues to change, evolve, adapt and move forward.   It is always my hope that commercial traffic on the Saginaw River will remain stable and even more so continue grow as the products and materials handled here continue to evolve and expand.  Hopefully 2026 will continue to build on the successes of the 2025 season and will be a safe and profitable one for everyone. 

I wish you all a safe and prosperous shipping season in 2026.  Thank you for following me during the year, supporting my social media pages, attending my presentations, and commenting on my photos!  Your support means more than you know.

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 5

In addition to all the commercial vessel product deliveries to the Saginaw River in 2025, there was also one commercial vessel that loaded here, taking a product from the Saginaw River to unload in Green Bay, WI.  On June 1^st, the Interlake Marine Logistics tug, Undaunted, and her self-unloading barge, Pere Marquette 41, arrived on the Saginaw River, in ballast, traveling upriver to the Sargent Docks and Terminal in Zilwaukee.  There they loaded a cargo of Gypsum, that was mined at the Keyterra Mine in Turner, MI.  This is a big development with more loads planned to be loaded here in 2026 and taken out of the Saginaw River.  Since the end of Grain exports in the 1990’s, you can count on one hand the number of vessels that have loaded a product on the Saginaw River to be taken for delivery, so this is an encouraging sign for the future.

Some other notable stories from the 2025 season:

      I finally have an update on Wilkinson Minerals.  In February 2020, it was announced that Wilkinson Minerals would be opening a facility on the Saginaw River, east of the Independence Bridge in Bay City, and begin pumping salt brine from a large deposit known as the Sylvania Sandstone Formation.  In April 2021, they announced they would be “tripling their investment” of $50 million to $150 million in Bay City.  Wilkinson Minerals stated that “the company would produce both liquid and dry salt products, with the liquid products primarily shipped out on the river”.  In the April 2021 report, plans were to have the plant up and running late 2023 or early 2024.  At a January 25, 2025, meeting of the Bay City Brownfield Redevelopment Authority, there was a vote to begin the process to abolish Wilkinson Minerals Brownfield Plan for the redevelopment of the property.  The Wilkinson Minerals project as originally presented will not be moving forward, a new developer is interested in the project but is not ready to move forward at this time and cannot utilize the current brownfield plan. A new plan could be put in place if the project moves forward in the future.

-        In August, Ryba Marine began an emergency dredging project at the Sixth Street Turning Basin in Saginaw, depositing the spoils in the Saginaw Dredged Material Disposal Facility on the Bay Saginaw County Line.

-        Ryba Marine, with their tug Thomas R. Morrish also began a project in July to construct a fish habitat reef approximately .5 miles east of the Confined Disposal Island in Saginaw Bay.  The project lasted all summer with limestone being loaded at the Wirt Sand & Stone Dock in Essexville and barged out to the reef location.  The project finished in October.

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 4

There were several vessels that made a delivery on the Saginaw River in 2024 that did not make a return visit here during the 2025 season.  These vessels included Houtmangracht, BBC Oregon, Happy Ranger, Karen Andrie/Endeavour, and tugs Leonard M. and Meredith Ashton.  There were three first time visitors to the Saginaw River in 2025:  BBC Ukraine, McAsphalt Advantage, and the tug Treasure Coast with her barge, Cement Transporter 7700.

Other vessels on the Saginaw River during the 2025 season were our local workhouse tug, North Dakota, tugs Kimberly Joy, Kathy Lynn, Thomas R. Morrish, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service vessel Spencer F. Baird, along with the R/V Wheeler, R/V Tanner, and R/V Channel Cat. The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Spar also visited at the beginning and end of the season to work Aids to Navigation.

During 2024, Rand Logistics, Inc. acquired Andrie, Inc., the company who operates the AmRize Cement vessels G.L Ostrander/Integrity and Samuel de Champlain/Innovation, as well as the Occidental Chemical tug/tank barge Spartan/Spartan II, all visitors to the Saginaw River.  At the end of the 2025 season, Rand announced that they were rebranding as Mainstay Maritime with American Steamship Company, Lower Lakes Towing, Grand River Navigation, and Andrie, Inc. all under their umbrella with 26 vessels.  I will be logging vessel passages with these changes for the 2026 season.

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 3

Saginaw River Year-End Report for 2025: Part 3

Tug-barge units were busy on the Saginaw River again during the 2025 season, with four of the top six spots for total number of visits held by tug-barge units. Once again, as has become the norm on the Saginaw River, the Rand Logistics, Inc./Grand River Navigation tug, Olive L. Moore, paired with the self-unloading barge Menominee, once again defended the title of “Workhorse of the Saginaw River”, making more trips to the river in 2025 than any other vessel. The pair logged 34 visits to the Saginaw River this season, 11 more than in 2024. Olive L. Moore/Menominee have held this title 19 out of the past 20 years, logging an incredible 711 visits to the Saginaw River during this time! The next closest was Interlake Steamship Company’s, tug Dorothy Ann, paired with the self-unloading barge Pathfinder who had 17 visits. Rounding out the list of most frequent visitors were American Courage with 15 visits, Samuel de Champlain/Innovation with 12 visits, then Robert S. Pierson and Defiance/Ashtabula both tied with 11 visits to the Saginaw River in 2025.

Tug and barge units accounted for almost half of the deliveries to the Saginaw River in 2025, logging 92 of the 190 commercial vessel passages or 48%.

The fleet leading the way with the most cargo deliveries to the Saginaw River during the 2025 season was far and away Rand Logistics, Inc. Their subsidiaries, Lower Lakes Towing and Grand River Navigation tallied 97 vessel passages, an increase of seven deliveries over 2024, accounting for 51% of all deliveries to the Saginaw River in 2025. They have now been leading the way on the Saginaw River for 18 of the past 19 years. The Interlake Steamship Company/Interlake Logistics Solutions logged the second most visits with 27 trips, two fewer visits than in 2024. Coming in third place was Algoma Central Corp. with 18 trips, Amrize Cement/Andrie, Inc. with 16 trips and McKeil Marine, Limited with 14 visits logged. These top companies accounted for 90% of all deliveries on the Saginaw River in 2025.

Since I started logging vessel passages with the 2005 season, there have been 3,744 commercial vessel deliveries to the Saginaw River during that time.

In a future post, I will be discussing Rand Logistics, the rebranding to Mainstay Maritime and the boats that operate under their umbrella. With tomorrow's post, we will start looking at some of the local stories from the season.

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 2

Today we focus on the docks that received product during the season. Deliveries were made at a total of 12 docking locations along the banks of the Saginaw River. Some of these dock locations serve more than one product or type of customer. One example of this is the Wirt Dock in Essexville, where in addition to sand and stone cargo, dry fertilizer, such as Potash, is also delivered to the dock and placed in domed storage buildings. The second would be the Port Fisher slip, where aggregate cargo is delivered for Bay Aggregates, and liquid asphalt is offloaded for Bit-Mat Products of Michigan, being placed in their liquid storage tanks. A third would be the Port Fisher Terminals Dock, where foreign saltwater vessels can offload various cargo items such as wind turbine components, industrial machinery, or other bulk cargo, and tug/barge units or tankers can deliver liquid cargo such as calcium chloride for Occidental Chemical.

With this in mind, there were 16 facilities that vessels unloaded product for in 2025, the same as in 2024. The individual dock seeing the most vessel traffic in 2025 was the Port Fisher Terminals/Bay Aggregates Dock in Bay City, with 51 vessel deliveries, one more delivery than during the previous season. The second most deliveries went to the Wirt Stone Dock in Saginaw with 50, two more deliveries than in 2024. They were followed by the Wirt Stone Dock in Bay City with 37 deliveries, the AmRize Cement dock in Essexville with 24 deliveries, with the Wirt Sand & Stone Dock in Essexville and the Burroughs North/GM Dock in Saginaw, tied with 19 cargo deliveries. These top docks accounted for 74% of the total commercial vessel deliveries during 2025. In all, accounting for split cargos, in which a vessel unloaded at two, sometimes three different docks during the same visit, from the 190 vessel arrivals, there were 269 deliveries to the various docks along the Saginaw River. This is 14 fewer actual dock deliveries than during the 2024 season. These numbers also show that there were 74 vessels that arrived with split loads, unloading at more than one dock during a visit.

Breaking down the number of visits to the lower river docks, or docks between the mouth of the Saginaw River and Liberty Bridge, of which there are nine, and the upper river docks, or docks near the Zilwaukee Bridge to the Sixth Street Turning Basin, of which there are seven. There was a total of 152 deliveries to lower river docks, nine fewer deliveries than in 2024, and a total of 122 deliveries where the vessel had to pass through the Bay City draw bridges on their way to the upper river to unload at Saginaw area docks, 5 fewer deliveries than last year.  

Saginaw River Year End Report - 2025 Season - Part 1

Today, I am excited to begin sharing with you my year-end report for the commercial shipping season on the Saginaw River. For 2025, it is a 15-page document with a lot of data on passages, docks, the vessels and their companies. I am not able to post the entire document in one piece on social media, but I will be breaking it down into smaller pieces over the next week or so to share the information. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.

The 2025 season officially began March 21, 2025. Early this morning, when many people were up at the Soo, waiting for the 8am opening of the locks for the season, the tug Samuel de Champlain and her powdered cement carrying barge, Innovation, quietly eased up the Saginaw River with no fanfare, arriving at the AmRize Cement Dock in Essexville around 4am. For the three AmRize workers and myself, who were there for the arrival, it was a beautiful early morning, with clear skies and a light breeze. This start to the season was three days earlier than the 2024 season.

The 2024 season then ended with the arrival of McAsphalt Advantage on an icy Saginaw River, delivering a liquid asphalt emulsion cargo to Bit-Mat Products of Michigan in the slip at Port Fisher in Bay City on December 23rd. The 2025 season on the Saginaw River lasted a total of 278 days, covering 10 months, which was three more days than in 2024. The season ended on the exact same day as in 2024 – December 23rd.

For the 2025 commercial shipping season, there was a grand total of 190 commercial vessel passages on the Saginaw River, representing a decrease of five passages compared to the year before. These passages were made by 30 different vessels, two fewer than the previous year, representing 14 different vessel management companies, one less than 2024.