Boat Nerd and last of the fall colors

The fall colors in the northland are about done for another season, one of the last to show their burnt orange color are the Tamaracks. After a few days they will drop their needles and stand bare until spring. From here on out there's not anything left to look forward to expect the fresh green colors of spring which is almost a half of a year away. If you like snow then you would have been pleased to see the flakes floating around this morning. Fortunately (for me at least) we have a warm weather pattern moving in and we should be in the upper 50's in a couple days.

BOATS....

O.K. so I have a Large Boat fetish... At least I don't own a big one, I just like watching them whenever I get close to the big lake. We've been up to Duluth/Superior a couple times in October and caught some nice viewing. The blue one below is the J W Shelley and is an older boat with a new owner that just came back to the great lakes this past summer. This picture was taken in the Duluth inner harbor at a secret spot. The Shelley is loaded with some form of grain and damned if I know where it was going with this load... Probably down to Buffalo or someplace like that.

This image shows the Shelley under the lift bridge headed out of the Duluth harbor and onto Lake Superior. On this day we were actually finished with our shopping in Duluth and had already saw a few other boats and were headed south into Wisconsin on the Blatnik bridge when I noticed the Shelley backing out from a dock in Superior. So.. it was back across the bridge and a bunch of pictures in a couple of my favorite spots and we headed home.

When we were coming into Duluth we saw the Orsula headed for the Duluth ship canal. The Orsula is a "saltie" that is flagged out of Majuro. I have no clue where that is but you can Google it if you really need to know... :-)

Inbetween boat watching we caught this steam locomotive headed into the railroad museum at the Depot in Duluth. The Depot is very impressive if you like trains and local history. This was a cool photo opportunity and the engineer was blowing the whistle in this image which provided all the white steam. It's interesting to see one of these big beasts running and to think that this was the way of the world not too many years ago.

After seeing the Orsula come in, one of my favorites, The "Big Paul" a.k.a. Paul R. Tregurtha
came into the Duluth ship canal. This is the largest boat on the great lakes and measures 1013 feet long and is 105 feet wide. The second pic below gives you an idea of just how massive this boat is. There were a lot of people out on this date so I did not feel alone.

USS FREEDOM

This past Sunday the newest vessel in the U.S. Navy's fleet the USS Freedom came to Duluth as part her sea trials. This was a great event and there was probably over a thousand patriots that greeted her. The crew was at attention and saluting the gallery and the gallery greeted the crew with lots of cheering and applause. I took my usual five thousand images with my digital camera and got a couple that I liked. I emailed some of my images to the Boatnerd.com web site and they were published today along with my comments. If you go to the site, click on the news channel and then scrool down to the new images for October 26th and you will see the images I submitted.

The USS Freedom is a very sophisticated boat and also very fast. Rumor has it that whe will cruise at well over 40 knots. The black spots on teh sides are exhaust ports for the diesel engines that move her. The Freedom carries her own small water craft and can house two helicopters on the rear deck garage area. The captain of the boat is from Hibbing, MN so it was a great home coming for him.

USS Freedom docked behind the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center.

Security around the DECC was tight, concrete barriers were placed closing Harbor Drive. A chain link fence was erected to keep the public away. It was pretty impressive to see the security measures that were taken.

That's it for now, I'm waiting for the big "noreaster" to hit Duluth and plan to make tracks up there to catch some wild wave pics. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it...