Saginaw River Passage - March 21, 2025: Samuel de Champlain/Innovation

While you were sleeping... Early this morning, while many people were up at the Soo, waiting for the 8am opening of the locks for the season, Samuel de Champlain/Innovation quietly eased up the Saginaw River with little fanfare, arriving at the Holcim Cement Dock in Essexville around 4am, marking the first vessel and delivery of the 2025 shipping season. For the three Holcim workers and myself, who were there for the arrival, it was a beautiful morning, with clear skies and a light breeze. March 21, 2025

The 2025 shipping season is underway on the Saginaw River! There most likely will not be any vessel traffic through the Bay City bridges until after March 31st as Independence and Lafayette bridges are both closed to masted navigation until then, but we could still see a few more lower river deliveries before then.

Saginaw River Look Back - Agawa Canyon

Over the next three days, I will be featuring my photos of the three Algoma classics: Agawa Canyon, Algorail, and Algoway. All three were frequent visitors to the Saginaw River and fixtures here for many years. Starting today with Agawa Canyon, she last visited the Saginaw River on September 29th 2009. She laid up after the 2009 season was then towed to Aliaga, Turkey in 2010 for scrapping. The photos in this post start with the 2002 season, ending with the last photo from the 2009 season.

Saginaw River Report - March 3, 2025

Interesting fact: Back about mid-February, the road salt pile at the Sargent Dock in Zilwaukee ran out. This was the first time in five seasons there was no road salt left at the dock. Sargent normally gets their salt from Goderich, ON, delivered by Algoma boats. It will be interesting to see what the 2025 season brings for the dock. The empty dock photos were taken today, 3/3/25.

Saginaw River Year End Review: December 2024

This is it, the last review post from the 2024 season:  The best of December.  In what seemed like a year where there was more overcast skies then sun when out taking photos, there were still a lot of great photo opportunities.  It was nice to be able to get some photos of the boats moving through the ice, a few sunrise/sunset photos, a bucket list trip up to Port Gypsum to catch Sam Laud loading there, and overall, just an incident free season taking photos of 57 different boats.  December only had 6 commercial vessel passages, bringing the year end total to 196 vessels.  While the monthly total was less than December 2023, the year end total was 27 vessels more.

For my fourth season flying the drone, December ended with 15 flights covering 19.76 miles, over 2 hours and 43 minutes.  That gave a grand total for 2024 of 206 flights, covering 233.34 miles, over 35 hours and 26 minutes.  Thanks for following along!  Hope you enjoyed the weekly review series!

Saginaw River Year End Review: November 2024

This is going to be a huge photo dump for November.  What a month!  Herbert C. Jackson with Northern Lights on the horizon, Saginaw on her namesake river, shooting photos of her in three different locations.  The last boats through Lafayette Bridge before demolition started, and plenty of tug/barge action.  There were 28 vessel passages in November, bringing us to 190 passages for the year to date.  By the end of November, I had now photographed 57 different vessels for the year.

November was also my biggest month ever for drone flights, with 31 total.  This worked out to 5 hours and 8 minutes of time in the air and 38.72 miles covered.  For the year to date at the end of November, I had flown 166 flights, covering 183.06 miles, over 28 hours 14 minutes.