MIGHTY SHIPS — PAUL R. TREGURTHA

She is the largest ship ever to sail on North America’s Great Lakes. She can carry fifty five thousand tons of cargo through ice, rough weather and impossibly narrow rivers and locks. The steel mills and power plants of American industry count on her to get through, whatever the risks. As you must have understood, this episode of the Mighty Ships series is devoted to Paul R. Tregurtha– mightiest of all Great Lakers.

Spring on Lake Michigan – the March ice is still thick but it is time for sleeping giant to wake up. This largest Great Laker is three hundred and eight meters long, just imagine that she is bigger than three football fields laid end to end. The ice is the biggest worry for the captain and crew members of this vessel. Paul R. Tregurtha is the first ship out of the gate and the competitors are going to follow her. She is only idle for two months of the season when the locks are closed by the Coast due to the freezing.

For then other ten months of the year she goes back and forth across the Lakes moving a truly astronomical amounts of coal and iron ore each trip. That is enough to fill five hundred railway cars. On the delivery end, she unloads the cargo herself using the eighty-meter conveyor boom…