Reporter's Notebook

Mackinaw Bridge

ABOARD THE FREEDOM – Like a string of diamonds and rubies laid across an onyx plate, Mackinaw Bridge stretched dead ahead across the horizon. The Freedom was running dark, its bridge lit only by the electronic consoles, with no navigation lights outside the ship. We had passed several big merchant ships, and I asked the captain, Cmdr. Don Gabrielson, if he was worried the Freedom might be too stealthy for a transit in these waters, potentially full of smaller civilian craft that wouldn’t be expecting a sleek gray barracuda.

“Yeah, some of the tugs have said they couldn’t see us,” he said. He nodded towards a bulk ore carrier, like the Edmund Fitzgerald, passing on our starboard side. “We had that guy get on the radio a little while ago and say, ‘hey, what kind of ship is that?’ And we said, ‘we’re a U.S. Navy warship,’ and they said, ‘oh, that makes sense.’ They don’t see too many vessels up here going 40 knots this time of year.” Or ever.

Gabrielson acknowledged there was something of a learning curve for a salt-water crew to learn how to drive their ship on the Great Lakes. They have help, though, in the form of Dan Hobbs, a master mariner with 30 years’ experience piloting tankers from Duluth to the St. Lawrence, who served as the Freedom’s sea trials captain this summer in Marinette. Hobbs is riding from Marinette to Montreal to help the Freedom’s crew navigate through waters that are new to many of them, but which he knows almost entirely by heart.

Most Great Lakes captains are essentially bus drivers, he said, making so many trips between familiar ports that they can almost pilot their vessels from memory. Hobbs’ familiarity with the lakes has come in handy so far, and he was on the bridge as the Freedom approached Mackinaw. The ship needed to meet a small boat on the east side of the span to pick up a part, and just as we began to pass underneath, he recommended to the officer of the deck that she switch on the ship’s navigation lights. I can only imagine what it must’ve looked like for the drivers on I-75 to see a Navy warship materialize below from the dark.