Great Lakes Car Ferries and Lake Freighters

[William Lafferty]

Two other factors in the relatively minuscule number of collisions between cross lake car ferries and freighters was that the car ferries operated among harbors with little constant commercial traffic, such as Chicago or Cleveland, where the odds would be higher of a collision, and not in constricted waterways, like the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers, where those odds would be higher still. Also, for a third of the year cross lake car ferries had virtually no other commercial traffic with which to contend. On Lake Michigan both the Pere Marquette and Ann Arbor car ferries were early adopters of radar. The car ferries seemed to have far, far more problems with stationary breakwaters than with moving vessels.

[Darryl]

Just curious, did The Boblo Boats ever have a serious accident?

[Mr Link]

George Hilton's book "Great Lakes Car Ferries" details numerous collisions. One of the more famous is the sinking of the car ferry Ashtabula after a collisioon with the steamer Ben Moreell in 1958. There were also lots of incidents on the Detroit and St. Clair rivers.

[Guest]

As the normal trading routes of car ferries on the Great Lakes usually ran perpendicular to the normal course lake freighters used while transiting the lakes it seems these would have been a high potential for accidents. This would have been especially true during the time in which there was considerably more traffic on the lakes and in poor weather conditions. Has anyone ever heard of any collisions or near-collisions between any car ferries and a lake freighter? The only instance I can recall reading about was an incident in which a freighter and a State of Michigan auto ferry brushed in the Straits of Mackinac. I believe that this cost the masters of both vessels their jobs as it had initially been unreported.