In March 1959, at anchor in the Bosporus off Istanbul at the far end of the Mediterranean, we heard the first rumor that Macon was scheduled to be in Chicago on the Fourth of July. In late August, alongside a dock in the River Clyde, in Glasgow, we mailed to the Cruiser Force Commander our general report of this remarkable excursion into fresh water.
These two waterways, the fast-running Bosporus and the shoal and narrow Clyde, were fitting markers for the start and finish of this fascinating voyage up the St. Lawrence River, into the Great Lakes, and back to the sea again. And they are, at the same time, a graphic illustration of the classic comment that “the sea is all one.” The inland lake cities are now world ports.
Taking a ship the size of Macon halfway across a continent was probably the most exhilarating experience that a cruiser captain could ever hope for. To be sure, a great deal of it was fairly normal steaming; in the wider reaches of the St. Lawrence and in the open Lakes the fresh water problems are much the same as those found in salt water. But the novelties were there, in good number, and they gave rise to situations that deep water sailors seldom dream of.
Professionally, the most notable general feature of the trip was that of operating in a totally new environment, often quite different from that in which most of us have been trained all our lives. At sea we normally stay well clear of passing ships; in narrow inland water, the trick is often to come as close as possible without touching. At sea, one sets a direct course for destination; in the lakes one follows well-traveled one-way paths (and a very good practice it is to obey this custom). At sea, we measure depths in fathoms and reach for deep water every chance we get; in the lakes and rivers, depths are measured in feet and inches and when the wind blows the water away, the lakers anchor and wait for the wind to blow it back again. At sea, the whistle signals are simple and universal; inland, the whistle signals are often local and not necessarily in strict accord with the printed rules (in the St. Lawrence, for instance, the pilots use different whistle signals in the upper, the middle, and the lower river). At sea we steer compass courses to the nearest degree; the lakers “head for the tall pine on the point” or “hold up on that red auto until the church comes in sight around the bend” (our helmsmen, blind in the conning tower, became quite good at steering to the nearest quarter-degree). At sea we use a one-third or two-thirds bell whenever we have to slow below standard speed; in the fresh water we used speeds as low as ten rpm and a two or three rpm change above or below two knots could be important. In salt water ports we use tugs and a platoon of linehandlers and often wait for slack water in which to dock; the lakers steam up to a dock in four knots of current, hold steady, and then put their own linehandlers over the side. Saltwater ships have rudders the size of a barn door with a 30-degree throw; the lakers have rudders as big as the side of the barn itself with a 45-degree throw. In the lakes and rivers the small ferries always keep clear of large ships, but to balance this blessing there is almost always an outboard out of sight under the hawsepipe trying to see how close he can come to the bow without getting hit. And if, for a moment, there isn’t one of those, there is probably a near-sighted young brave swimming out from the bank to get a closer look at the ship as she passes.
But, with all the comment that we offer on things that were unusual to us, one fact became more clear with each day we spent in sailing through this vast fresh water system: the standard operating procedures that have been developed for these inland waters are carefully tailored by very fine sailormen to their own highly specialized needs in their own environment. There are lots of differences between that and sailing in deep salt water.
When we first heard that we were going, there were a thousand ideas and suggestions as to how best to get ready. Fortunately, the Cruiser Force Staff had been at work for weeks without our being aware of it, and our Cruiser Division Commander had gone inland to see the St. Lawrence and talk to some of the men who for years had been sailing the River and the Lakes.
What it all boiled down to was that we would need to reduce our draft, cut down our mast heights, and bolster our propeller guards. There was really nothing else except to study the charts, take an advance look at the River and the Welland Canal, and hope.
Normally Macon draws between 26 and 27 feet in salt water. The permissible draft for the critical parts of the passage was 23.5 feet and the fresh water factor was an additional eight inches that we would sink when we left salt water behind us. The only controllable weights were fuel and ammunition, and the engineers did our figuring for us. It was a little bit tricky, since draft is normally measured from the keel and our rudder extends twenty inches below the keel; so in addition to losing weight, we had to trim down by the head to get the rudder up.
With roughly one-third of our fuel and one-quarter of our ammunition on board and carried well forward, our rudder and our forefoot were both drawing about 23.5 feet in fresh water. As we burned fuel and had on board less than the “balance” quantity, we became lighter forward and the draft at the
rudder began to increase again.
Our advance estimates indicated that the critical parts of the journey, as far as draft was concerned, would be the Welland Canal and the Detroit River. And so we worked our fuel consumption backward to see how much to take aboard at Boston in order to have on board the desired 250,000 gallons as we passed through the Detroit River. As it turned out, our guess was only about 10,000 gallons off, and we were trimmed as we wanted when we got there. We refueled in Chicago, again gauging our need for draft at the Detroit River two weeks later; and then had our third refueling in Cleveland, this time estimating our consumption to be properly trimmed for the downbound passage of the Welland Canal. We fudged a little on that last one though, because we also wanted a good trim at minimum draft in the narrow channel above Montreal where we had recorded two feet underfoot near the Côte St. Catherine Lock during the upstream passage.
All in all, draft and trim control did not turn out to be an unduly difficult problem, although we did arrive uncomfortably light off Chicago. The rudder response when we had less than 20% of our fuel on board was a little sloppy, and the Officer-of-the-Deck had orders not to use more than ten degrees of rudder at speeds over ten knots in the open Lakes. We had noticed a tendency to heel and hang if we used much rudder during the passage through Lakes Huron and Michigan and those of us on the bridge had heard some tart comments from the messing spaces when unwary souls had caught their soup in their laps.
The height problem was another that the Cruiser Force staff solved for us before we got back from the Mediterranean. There are several 120-foot lift bridges in the St. Lawrence and the Welland Canal and our foretop and maintop were both nearly 140 feet. So we dismounted our two highest radars and a few of the UHF antennae and then, with our new crewcut, we had only 112 feet at the foremast and mainmast platforms.
We were skeptical of the figures and, before we left Boston, we adjusted our fuel to minimum draft and actually measured the two highest points from the foremast and mainmast to the waterline. After applying the eight-inch fresh water factor, the measurements were within four inches of the blueprint predictions and so we breathed easily on that matter.
We also, in that harried two weeks we had in Boston between our return from the Mediterranean and our departure for the River, took actual measurements of our maximum beam. The eighty-foot locks had begun to look more and more narrow as departure date approached and we figured we would look awfully silly if we were to get stuck trying to squeeze into the first lock. The blueprints turned out to be right. We had just about 74 feet between the armor belts at the widest point of the hull, but that was not all. The whaleboat davits were amidships and the davit sockets reached out an additional 11 inches on each side. So we dismounted the davits and went without the whaleboats. Our daytime “lifeboat” for the inland cruise was the helicopter and at night we kept ready a 33-foot utility boat handled by the unwieldy crane at the stern. Fortunately no one went overboard. It would have been a problem if it had happened with any sort of a sea running.
With the installation of bigger and stronger propeller guards, the rest of the preparation of the ship consisted of painting and titivation. Paint and titivate. It sounds normal and routine, but never had we seen so much hard work and such beautiful results. Shining new paint from the waterline to the tops. The last few inches at the muzzle of each gun taken down to bare, glistening steel and then a copper contrast band clinched on at the beginning of the paint. Simonize over the paint on every one of the 37-gun barrels from the long 8-inch turret guns down to the two old six-pounders of the saluting battery. New canvas all around and hoses scrubbed till they looked like new. Decks refinished and dadoes cut in anew. Padeyes, white for use in night replenishment, outlined in thin lines of black enamel. Signs made and stanchions and lines rigged to guide visitors. One hundred thousand (we underestimated) pamphlets printed to give to visitors.
And Macon, manned by the proudest crew that ever went to sea, was ready for the St. Lawrence, fully fit for the President and the Queen who were soon to review her.
One of the two weeks of preparation time that the ship had in Boston was spent by the Commanding Officer and the Navigator in a preliminary look at the Seaway. The two of us took passage in Kleinsmith, an APD, from Montreal upstream to Lake Ontario and then made a transit of the Welland Canal in one of the big, new ore carriers whose length and beam were very close to those of Macon. It was well worth the effort because it let us recognize our problems at first-hand rather than merely speculate upon them as we had been doing up to that point. It was at this time, for instance, that we decided not to run the river at night. In daylight, we could see the currents before we were into them and could apply compensating rudder before the crosscurrents had thrown us off course. At night we would have often had to wait to feel the currents before we could respond to them. Since most of the time the usable channel width was well under 500 feet, we didn’t want to get skewed across the channel before we knew what was happening. At the same time, we decided that there was no reason not to pass through the Welland Canal at night if our schedule were to call for that. With no strong currents in the Canal, there was no reason to complicate further the already difficult scheduling problem of the Task Force Commander and the Seaway and Canal authorities.
Finally, on the 18th of June, we sailed from Boston and ran right into an ugly little storm in Cabot Strait between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. There was enough sea running to tear loose a ready-ammunition box on the main deck forward, but we held to our schedule and stood on into the Gulf of St. Lawrence on time. We picked up the first pilot on the south bank of the River at Father Point (this in a fog so dense we could not see the jackstaff from the bridge) and stood on upstream. By the time we had come abreast of the Saguenay River, where the St. Lawrence first begins to narrow and the buoyage system begins, it was hazy but not foggy and we had no trouble seeing where we were visually as well as by radar.
The lower River, from the sea up to Quebec, presented no problems. We went on upstream at fifteen knots admiring the grandeur of the hills along the north shore at Saguenay and Murray Bay, and answering the dips from colors ashore as well as those from passing ships.
We moored at Quebec overnight and here we first made use of our docking pilot. Long before we had gotten back from the Mediterranean, our Cruiser Division Commander had sensed that tug services in the River and Lakes would be limited. Early planning had included some YTBs from the East Coast naval bases as part of the task force and these sturdy little tugs turned out to be most useful. The Division Commander, a good sailor and one-time cruiser captain, had realized at once that handling tugs is a fine art and that we needed such an artist. And so he had had ordered to Macon, for the duration of the cruise, one of the Norfolk Naval Base docking pilots to provide the tug-handling skill that naval officers, spending their time in open water, could never acquire. For those who have never watched a skilled docking pilot at work, it should be explained that this is a most highly specialized skill within the specialized profession of piloting.
And on this same subject, tugs are of two kinds—pullers and pushers. Any tug can pull, no matter what its size. It takes a good stout tug with lots of horsepower to push, but the pushers are a far more flexible tool and, with a couple of pushers working alongside, a good docking pilot can do tricks that seem impossible with a big ship.
We moored at Quebec (with local commercial pullers) without incident the evening of the 21st and stood on up into the middle River (this is the section of the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal) the next morning.
The River narrows above Quebec and the first potential hazard is met at the Richelieu Rapids. Going upstream, we passed these rapids at high water and they weren’t nearly as much a concern as the foggy haze that hung low over the River. Later, on the downstream passage, we passed this particular bit of the channel at low water with the jagged rocks dry on either side and wondered how we could have been so blasé when we stood upstream. The current in here varies from three to five knots depending on the tide.
From Richelieu Rapids to Three Rivers is a wide and well-marked channel with the current generally along the line of the channel. The Quebec-Three Rivers pilot left us here and the Three Rivers-Montreal pilot came aboard. It is here, in the vicinity of Three Rivers, that the tidal effect disappears and there is only the river current to take into account.
Perhaps it is as well here as any place to note that, while the River pilots normally take the conn of merchant vessels, we used them only as conning advisors. Our characteristics and handling and conning techniques (with the helmsman a deck lower and unable himself to see outside) were so different from the merchantmen to which the pilots were accustomed that one of us, the Captain or the Officer-of-the- Deck, kept the conn at all times.
Arriving that evening, the 22nd of June, at Montreal, we moored again to a commercial dock along the River bank.
None of the River we traversed thus far had been a problem. Oceangoing ships for years have been making Montreal and there was novelty but no difficulty in the lower and middle portions of the River. The next morning we started into the upper River where this magnificent and almost incredible St. Lawrence Seaway has been created to tame one of the world’s great rivers.
Fully into fresh water now, we stood up the channel to St. Lambert, the first of the Seaway Locks. The approach channel from Montreal harbor is clearly marked still water, quite a change from the four or five knots of the River itself as it emerges from the Lachine Rapids into Montreal harbor.
The locks take a bit of explanation since they are so different from those at Panama with which most of us are familiar. They are 80 feet wide and vary (in the Seaway and in the Welland Canal) from 766 feet to 715 feet in length. Since Macon is only 675 feet long, the lock length was never a problem. At each end of the locks the concrete approach walls are angled out about fifteen or twenty degrees. One of these angled approaches is short, perhaps 100 to 150 feet, and the other leads into a waiting wall, usually parallel to the line of the dock, from 700 to 1,200 feet long and about four feet high above the water.
Our introduction to St. Lambert was a rough one. We stood up the channel and, since the lock was closed, made the waiting wall. We purposely held at its outer end in order to get a fair shot at the lock entrance without trying to “walk” up the wall and around its two sharp corners.
A destroyer came up about twenty minutes after we arrived and we asked him to go to the wall ahead of us so we could square away after leaving the wall and before entering the lock.
Then another destroyer stood up the channel and asked to moor alongside us. We told him we were moving shortly and asked him to hold in the channel, but the destroyer ahead invited him alongside and we found ourselves faced with a nest instead of a single destroyer to work around. About this time we were called up and given the green traffic light by the lock gate. We sprung ourselves out, carefully working around the destroyer nest ahead of us, and when we got abreast the destroyers the surprises came. The light turned red, the railroad bridge was lowered a hundred yards ahead of the jackstaff, and the first freight train started across.
Fortunately there was not much wind. We hovered for an hour and five minutes while five long freight trains ambled across ahead of us. The slight current from the spillway on the port quarter made for some difficulty, but a touch on the engines every now and then kept us fairly steady.
We had drifted almost over to the shoal water on the port hand when finally the bridge went up and the light turned green again. We twisted the bow to starboard and moved ahead toward the lock, then backed the port engines to swing the bow to the left. So far so good. To stop the swing, we went ahead a little on the port engines and backed a little on the starboard and, much to our amazement, swung sharply to port and ended up with the bow resting against the short left-hand approach wall.
It took a few moments to figure that one out. The wash from the backing starboard screws had gone up along the starboard wall, bounced off the angled right-hand approach and, having no place else to go, had pushed the bow to port. All perfectly normal, hindsight being better than our foresight at that moment, but it left us in a fix. We could not twist back to the right with the engines. We either had to back off and scratch our cherished paint or swallow our pride and call a tug.
And, bless their stout little hearts, one of the YTBs was there. He squeezed in between Macon and the nested destroyers, took a line from the starboard bow, gave just enough of a pull to start the bow to starboard and skittered back out of the way again.
We eased on into this first lock without further incident and, during the process, found out that the lift bridges were in fact 120 feet above the water line. We had eight feet to spare overhead.
Here at St. Lambert Lock we also found out that the big foot-thick wooden fenders were not necessary. Small wooden 4X4's, light enough for one man to handle, were ample to protect the bulwarks around the high 3-inch guns in the waist of the ship and the other sections around the main deck where we came close to the lock walls.
The ship was conned all the way into the lock, using both rudder and engines, and no lines were put over until we had backed down and stopped in place inside the lock.
We had, before leaving Boston, installed some outsize propeller guards below the regular propeller guards. These new ones were lower, so they would not ride over the low approach walls or the tops of the lock walls when the locks were filled. They were also wider, coming out to the width of the beam amidships on the starboard side and a foot more than that on the port side to protect our Regulus missile ramp which projected out from the port quarter. The idea behind extending these propeller guards so far out was to give us virtual straight lines from the widest points of the ship at her waist to these two extended guards at the propeller positions aft. This way, we figured, we could take the locks in much the same way that the straight-sided ore boats do.
When these ore boats get the full width of the ship inside the locks—much farther forward, of course, than the fine-lined Macon—they have the problem licked.
Our first look at a lock gate dispelled this happy notion. The wooden rubbing rails on the gates were widely spaced and at varied heights from lock to lock, and if we had ever put pressure on them by dragging the narrow facing edge of our propeller guards across them, we might have done the gates considerable and notorious damage.
Against a concrete surface the guards were usable, but the hardest part of entering and leaving the locks was to conn the stern past the gates without letting the propeller guards touch. It was a busy telephone line from aft to the bridge.
Actually, in entering and leaving the locks, the Commanding Officer used four sources of information. One was this critically important telephone from the stern of the ship. Two were from the bridge wings, the Navigator on one side and our Norfolk docking pilot on the other, each calling a constant report on distance from the ship to the wall, and the fourth was the Commanding Officer’s own visual sighting from the centerline on the bridge over the jackstaff to check heading and drift. The synthesis of these four data sources worked out very well. We always felt we had full knowledge and full control of the ship’s movement in these amazing squeeze-throughs. “Amazing” because we managed to lock through with no damage and no paint scratched except for one propeller guard. We will take that one up when we come to it.
Above St. Lambert, with one locking behind us and 29 to go (there are seven locks in the River and eight in the Welland Canal) we stood on up the protected channel past the River boiling down through the Lachine Rapids on the other side of the embankment.
A dozen miles farther up is the next lock, Côte St. Catherine, and by the time we got there, the Captain was beginning to catch his breath. During the hour-long transit up the canal from St. Lambert, he had recovered from the preposterous business of waiting in midstream for five long and leisurely freight trains.
We took Côte St. Catherine Lock on a dead run, so to speak—slowed to four knots, drew a bead on the center of the far gate, sailed in without touching, and backed two-thirds after we were inside. It was a good entry, but much too fast to try a second time. Four knots isn’t much speed in open water, but it is a pretty fair clip with high concrete walls only three feet away on each side and a solid concrete lock sill dead ahead.
Another few miles of the new canal that bypasses the Lachine Rapids, and we were in Lake St. Louis. Here, off the town of Beauharnois, we anchored for a few days before the official opening of the Seaway.
After the ceremonies at the St. Lambert Lock which officially opened the St. Lawrence Seaway, Queen Elizabeth II and the President of the United States embarked in Britannia and sailed past the sixteen RCN and USN ships anchored in a long line down the channel in Lake St. Louis. With the ships full-dressed and the rails manned, it was a thrilling sight as Britannia steamed past close aboard. Knowing perfectly well that the bluejackets manning the rail on the off side would be twisting their heads around to see, no matter what we told them, we solved that problem in advance. We faced them inboard so they could see across the ship. Unorthodox, to be sure, but it did keep all hands steady and as an unexpected dividend it just about doubled the volume of the cheers as the Royal Yacht steamed past.
At morning light on Saturday, the 27th, we were to resume our passage of the upper River. The day dawned dull and foggy. Light rain fell intermittently. Fragments of schedule changes trickled in through noisy radio circuits. And every now and then a destroyer got underway and groped through the mist toward the lower of the two Beauharnois Locks. By mid-day we had started and, with two locks already behind us, we were old hands and took the lower and upper Beauharnois Locks on the fly, but a little more sedately than we had taken Côte St. Catherine on the first day. It was here, entering the lower lock and steaming from the lower into the upper lock, that we had our first good try at steaming at very low speeds. Macon, with four propellers, makes roughly ten rpm per knot. Our rudder stops permit a maximum of thirty degrees right and left rudder. The engineers apparently had no difficulty in steaming at ten, fifteen or twenty rpm, and once we got the knack of using lots of rudder for short periods of time rather than a little bit of rudder held constantly, the ship could be put precisely where we wanted her. With most of her superstructure abaft the pivot point (just about at the foremast), a crosswind has more effect on the stern than on the bow and Macon tends to turn upwind. At very slow speeds even light breezes were a factor, and we had to keep the wind always in mind and take it into account.
This slow speed steaming is a real workout for helmsmen. “Right thirty”; “midships”; “right thirty”; “midships”; “Steady as you go”; and “Two-one-nine a quarter, Sir.” A half hour of this kind of work and the helmsman is wringing wet. We had two of them whom we used in all the narrow channels and lockings.
Before we left the Mediterranean in the spring, we had culled our helmsmen very carefully, looking for half a dozen who had that rare intuitive “feel” of the ship. By the time we arrived in Quebec, we had settled on two who were outstandingly good. They could hold a course within a quarter of a degree and could sense, as soon or sooner than we could on the bridge, when wind or current was taking effect on the ship. They could also sense and compensate for one other factor that we had not encountered before. This was bank suction. In narrow channels the stern tends to drag toward whichever is the nearer bank; if we were to the right of the channel center, for instance, the stern would tend to swing to starboard, and it sometimes took 25 degrees of right rudder in these cases to hold a steady course. Actually, this is a relatively “safe” phenomenon because it makes the bow always head back toward the center of the channel.
The lakers employ a most startling procedure to pass each other in these narrow channels. The two ships, heading in opposite directions, each hold to the channel center until they are about two ship-lengths apart. Then each heads just enough to the right (port-to-port passings are the almost invariable rule) so that the bows pass with about one ship-width between them. Then, as the bows pass, the two ships straighten out and let the sterns go each toward its own right bank. The effect of this is to pass parallel with each ship heading back toward the channel center by the time the sterns clear each other. It is a good, and probably the only, way to manage, but the first two or three times that a saltwater sailor tries it, it looks awfully close.
Above the two Beauharnois Locks, the long Beauharnois Canal leads about twelve miles upstream to Lake St. Francis. This lake, which is a wide and quiet section of the river like Lake St. Louis and Lake St. Peter farther downstream, is traversed by a well-marked channel. Out toward the middle of the Lake, the channel widens to provide some good anchorage ground between Beauharnois and the U. S. locks twenty miles farther on upstream.
Above Lake St. Francis the River narrows and the current increases again until Cornwall Island is reached. Here there is a sharp left turn through a stiff current, then right, then left, then right again around Cornwall Island and under a suspension bridge. At this point comes the awkward current at Polly Gut. Here, the main stream of the River comes in from the north side to join the ship channel almost from a right-angled approach. A cleverly designed rock “training wall” redirects the current more nearly down the ship channel as the two converge, but in spite of this, it is still very turbulent water. Currents at the point of juncture vary from an estimated four to eight knots, but they are not constant. They move in large circular swirls from one side of the ship channel to the other. When we had made the look-see passage earlier in Kleinsmith, we had seen that the much smaller ship twisted almost twenty degrees off course for a moment, and we had also seen an oceangoing freighter grounded on the south bank of the channel. We were quite wary of Polly Gut as we approached in Macon. Luck was with us, though, and we passed through the confluence at an apparently quiet moment without difficulty.
Here, at dusk and in a hazy drizzle that gave us less than a mile of visibility, we sighted the welcome lights of Snell Lock up ahead.
Of the seven St. Lawrence Seaway Locks, five are Canadian and two are American. Snell Lock and Eisenhower Lock, connected by the three-mile Wiley-Dondero Ship Channel, are the U. S. contribution. The St. Lambert, the Côte St. Catherine, and the two Beauharnois Locks downstream and the Iroquois Lock upstream from the U. S. pair are Canadian, as well as much of the special channeling, such as the canal around Lachine Rapids and the Beauharnois Canal.
We slid into Snell Lock, shifted pilots again, and eased along the welcome quiet water of the Wiley- Dondero Channel to Eisenhower Lock. By this time it was fully dark and the fog had settled down quite heavily. After ensuring that no ships were moving in the upper River, the lockmaster gave us permission to moor at the upstream waiting wall at Eisenhower Lock for the rest of the night.
The fog thinned out a little in the early morning and we were off again before six. From the Eisenhower Lock upstream to Lake Ontario the channels were increasingly narrow, a little more tortuous, and marked by a greater frequency of crosscurrents. The natural channel of the river in many places snakes back and forth from one side to the other and the artificial channels for shipping are dug generally along the natural channel but with frequent short cuts across its many bends.
Iroquois Lock, some twenty miles above Eisenhower Lock, is the seventh and last of the St. Lawrence Seaway Locks. It is the only one which is not a high-lift lock. The first six lift the ships from twenty to 49 feet each. Iroquois Lock, with a maximum lift of six feet, serves as the control lock to regulate the river water in accordance with the height of the water in Lake Ontario. The Iroquois Control Dam and the Lock are adjacent, and the entire flow of the River over the Dam comes into the wide portion through which the ship must pass in making the Lock entrance. Our pilot told us that some ships had had difficulty here but, again, we were lucky and the crosscurrent was not unmanageable.
The upstream approach to (or exit from) the Iroquois Lock is more of a problem. A strong current crosses the ship channel at about a forty-degree angle just at the end of the upstream waiting wall. Here we actually watched a ship go aground.
There was a merchantman downbound above Iroquois Lock and we were not cleared to depart until she had made the waiting wall. Radio control of ship movements in the more difficult portions of the River is quite effective. In no case did we meet a ship unexpectedly on a bend.
The lock gate had opened but the exit light remained red and we lay quietly in Iroquois Lock waiting for the merchantman to round the bend upstream. She came down wide on the turn, and the Canadian shipmaster with us (he was on board as an invaluable but unofficial and unpaid advisor) remarked casually, “That fellow is in trouble. He is either going to ram the wall head-on or is going to go aground.”
Sure enough, the cross current caught the merchantman, a saltwater cargo ship, and he tried too late to work back up to the center of the channel. Finally, with (it seemed to us) an anchor underfoot, he was steaming nearly cross-wise in the channel when the full strength of the current took hold and eased him backwards onto the shoal with the after third of the ship hard aground. He didn't ram the wall but he certainly did go aground.
Preserver, the submarine rescue ship, had been waiting well upstream from Iroquois Lock to make the Thousand Islands passage with us. We left Preserver and one of the ubiquitous YTBs to help the grounded ship and eased on out of the Lock, around the merchantman, and stood on upstream.
But in “easing” out of this Lock, we had our first mishap with the port propeller guard. The only sensible way to leave one of these locks under power (and there is no other way to get out) is to get up enough headway to gain good steering control as soon as the stern clears the lock. In this case, headed upstream, the cross current would begin to push our bow to port before we would reach the end of the waiting wall on the right-hand side. The shorter wall on the left-hand side offered no protection and just beyond that, also on the left, there was half the length of the grounded merchantman reaching out to the middle of the channel. We saw no chance but to claw up to the right as soon as we could, and pass the merchantman on the upstream side of the cross current. And we didn’t have much more than one and one-half ship’s lengths to do this after the stern cleared the lock.
If we could emerge from the lock already headed a few degrees to the right, we would be that much better off. So we started out of the lock on the port engines with right rudder, backing every now and then with the starboard engines to keep the bow up, and using the port propeller guard as the pressure point rubbing against the lock wall. The engines were stopped and a little left rudder used to get the guard off the wall as we passed the upstream gates and, as we cleared past the gates, an errant gust of wind from the starboard set the stern back on the port wall. The weight and moment were too much. The wood and metal facing of the port propeller guard crumpled. We did not know the extent of damage until some time afterward because, on the bridge, we were exceedingly busy trying to get the ship up past the merchantman before the cross current set us down on her bows. As soon as the stern cleared the lock, we had rung up fifteen knots and asked for double acceleration, both to get the best possible steering control and to clear past the cross current as quickly as possible. We made it, breathed easier, and slowed to ten knots as we came back to the center of the channel in the bend round Toussaint Island.
The shipfitters took a look at the battered guard and decided they could fix it. Later on, while Macon was crossing Lake Ontario at twenty knots, four of them put on safety lines and went over the side with cutting and welding torches. They got it fixed before we reached the Welland Canal. We were not through with that port propeller guard yet, but more of that later.
Upstream from Iroquois Lock we came into the full beauty of the upper River. Except for one ten-mile stretch above Ogdensburg where the entire width of the River is straight and deep, the next 50-odd miles above Iroquois Lock are all in channels whose usable width varies between 300 and 600 feet. There are wider places here and there, to be sure, but this stretch upstream is generally a buoy-hopping affair.
As we neared the Thousand Islands the weather turned clear and lovely and the motorboats and outboards came out in increasing numbers. All of the boaters were, of course, genuinely interested and the vast majority were well-mannered and sensible boat-handlers. These we were delighted to see and to wave to. But the small lunatic fringe did add a few gray hairs until we learned to ignore them. One officer on the bridge summed it up very nicely when he commented that he did not much care what happened to one particularly offensive out-boarder (who was weaving back and forth close across the stem of the ship), but he dreaded the chore of the letters we would have to write if that young fool should come a cropper and drown himself.
There were lots of dredges still working various sections of the upriver channel and all of them gave forth with the cheery whistle salute—three long and two short blasts—that served as our greeting all through the upper River and the Great Lakes. We answered most of them when it did not conflict with passing signals and later, in the Detroit and St. Clair Rivers, we even exchanged these inland whistle salutes with railroad trains. The oddest exchange of salutes came two nights later, at 3:00 a.m. in the Welland Canal, when we were greeted at one point by a battery of coordinated automobile horns. Since everyone in the Ontario peninsula seemed to be along the Canal banks that night, we figured there was no one left at home to be waked up and so we answered that one, too.
The Thousand Islands make an unbelievably lovely waterway. This writer would like nothing better than to go back some time and make the passage in a thirty-footer so that he could enjoy the full beauty of it.
The narrow six-mile reach past Wellesley Island and under the Thousand Islands Bridge was probably the most intriguing of the entire passage. The channel is right up to the shore on both sides, and the summer cottagers waved from their lawns or called to us from second-story windows. The cottages are close aboard as one passes in a ship and the greetings are cheerful and neighborly.
Later that afternoon, about 4:00 p.m., we dropped our local pilot at Cape Vincent and moved out into Lake Ontario. The shipfitters went over the side to repair the damaged propeller guard, and we cranked on first twenty, then twenty-five knots in order to be off Port Weller and the Welland Canal by the following morning.
The Seaway opening and the influx of men-of-war had raised the traffic load and there was some congestion in the Welland Canal. The authorities there were most considerate and our delay not a long one. We entered the Canal before mid-day and started on through toward Port Colborne on the shores of Lake Erie.
The statistics of the Welland Canal are interesting. Completed thirty years ago, it is a little over 24 miles long (27.6 statute miles. All distances in this description are in nautical miles even though the common usage in the Lakes and upper River is in land, or statute, miles). The Canal has eight locks, seven high- lift locks with lifts of 44 to 48 feet, and one control lock whose lift is two to eleven feet depending on the water level in Lake Erie. The total lift is 327 feet and the Canal channel is 310 feet wide on the surface and 200 feet wide at the bottom. The controlled depth is 27 feet and the permissible maximum draft is 25 feet. We just made that draft. There are seven rolling-lift bridges, eleven vertical-lift bridges, two swing bridges and a guard gate above Lock Number 7. The locks are all eighty feet wide, as are the bridges at the locks. Most of the other bridges are 200 feet wide except for one double-swing bridge that has openings of 102 feet on one side and 92 feet on the other. This particular bridge is at a turn in the Canal and is truly a hair-raiser for saltwater sailors who are not used to this sort of thing.
The first three locks on the upbound passage were not much different from the Seaway locks in the River. Each of them has a spillway on the east side (the “up” transit is to southward), but the sets from these currents are not bad. The Canal authorities were very kind and gave us a clear passage from lock to lock, so that we did not have to make any of the waiting walls. Locks 4, 5, and 6 are the famous “flight of locks” up the side of the same escarpment that forms Niagara Falls. These three locks are paired, with three upbound locks and three downbound locks, side by side. In the “flight” there is no open canal between the locks; ships steam out of one lock directly into another. By having separate locks for upbound and for downbound ships, the flow of traffic is greatly increased.
The last of the high-lift locks, No. 7, is about a third of a mile beyond the “flight” and, clearing this, the novice begins to breathe more easily.
This is a mistake.
Three quarters of a mile above Lock No. 7 is the Guard Gate. This is a safety device, so arranged (we understood) that the gates of the Guard Gate are closed whenever the upper gates of Lock No. 7 are open.
We had gotten fairly used to taking our 74-foot-wide ship into eighty-foot locks, even reaching the point where we could relax and enjoy it as soon as we got the full beam of the ship inside the throat of the entrance. The Guard Gate is a different situation. Not only must the ship steam into this eighty-foot target, it must keep going and steam right on out again without touching. One bluejacket watched this process with a critical eye and, when we had passed safely through, summed it up quite succinctly. “Real squeezy, ain’t it, Captain?” was all he said.
But to backtrack a little and return to our bête-noir, the port propeller guard. When we were leaving Lock No. 1, the first of the Welland Locks, there was a light breeze from the starboard quarter. Because of this we were again emerging from a lock heading up a little to the right to be upwind of the center of the channel and using the port propeller guard (newly repaired) as our pressure point along the concrete facing of the lock.
None of us saw it. We think it was a small stairwell cut into the side of the lock. Whatever it was, it was an unexpected break in the smooth wall just big enough to let the propeller guard slide in and be sheared off. This time we really ruined it, and it was not only unusable but a hazard to the lock gates if we scraped the loose ends of steel across them. In addition, of course, both the outboard propeller and the missile ramp were unprotected if the port quarter kissed the wall.
We had done all our thinking in terms of taking the locks as straight as possible. Now we found we had to make the next seven locks canted enough to the left, while entering, while flooding, and while leaving, so that the port quarter would never touch. And, since there was no choice, this is what we did. We went through seven more locks, the guard gate, and the narrow swing bridge, conning the stern every inch of the way to keep that miserably vulnerable port quarter well clear of the concrete. We didn’t touch, but we felt like a man with bunions on a crowded subway platform at rush hour. We moved very gingerly.
Apart from that we had no difficulty. Our guest Canadian shipmaster (a superb mariner if ever we saw one) and our excellent Canadian canal pilot talked us through the rough spots. After it got dark (a big ore boat makes the Canal transit in about fifteen hours and we took about seventeen, favoring our “bunion” in the locks), the lights reflected on the water made some of the canal turns a little confusing and our Canadian guest actually conned the ship to take us through the last eight or ten miles of the Canal to the water-level-control lock at Port Colborne.
Here we met the last of our Welland Canal problems. We got into this eighth Canal lock without difficulty and, since it is very long (1,148 feet), one of our submarines, Sablefish, and one of the YTBs came in astern of us and we were lifted the two or three feet needed to match the level of Lake Erie.
The waiting wall on the upbound side of Lock No. 8 is a straight continuation of the line of the left side of the lock. There is no angling off, as in all the other locks, so that waiting ships are directly in the path of egress. About 1,000 feet, not quite 1½ ship’s lengths away from the lock exit, a large, fat, saltwater merchantman was moored. Normally, by twisting a little to the right as we emerged, we could have cleared her easily. But we did not dare let our port quarter touch and we could not twist to the right, even a little, without touching. So we planned to run a long spring line from the starboard bow out along the right-hand wall and bring the bow over clear of the merchantman after the stern cleared the lock.
The submarine astern lent us some linehandlers (we had no way to retrieve our own linehandlers once we had left this last lock) and we started out. As we moved forward, the linehandlers walked the long spring line up the dock and started around the angle to the right-hand waiting wall. We had not seen it in the dark, but a high wire fence blocked them from going any farther. Even if they had climbed the fence, it hung out over the water enough so they could not pass the heavy line around it. There was no time for debate; we were moving. So we thanked them, waved them off, retrieved the spring line, and crossed our fingers.
When the stern was clear of the lock we had about half a length to the ship dead ahead. So slowly, with the engines, we twisted the stern to starboard and got that half of the ship over on the clear side of the exit channel. Then we applied the lesson we had learned so painfully back at St. Lambert Lock. We gave the port engines a short but strong backing bell, to send a big slug of water down between the bow and the left-hand wall. It worked. The bow started to swing to starboard and as it did, we went ahead on all engines. We had called up one of the YTBs but there was not room enough for him to work alongside, either pushing or pulling. So our docking pilot spotted him between the two merchantmen (only after we were out of the dock did we see that there was a second ship moored to the wall behind the first one) to put his stern to the wall and stick his nose out to give us a push to the right as we went past. This he did and it kept our bow clear to the right. But when the bow came right, the stern closed toward the merchantman we were then squeezing past. And every one of us knew what the results would be if those jagged pieces of steel that used to be our port propeller guard were to come in contact with the merchant hull. We would have cut into her with a king-sized can opener. So, as we passed, we gave two or three quick backing bells and the water-cushion between Macon and the merchantman did the trick.
Then we scrabbled around the bend, past the second merchantman, through the last two bridges, and out into the welcome open waters of Lake Erie just at morning light.
It was not a very dignified or stately exit for a heavy cruiser, but it was dark and the enthusiastic spectators along the banks seemed to find no fault. There probably was an easier way to have gotten out of there; the best we can say for the method we used is that it worked. At any rate, it had been a long night and, except for the propeller guard built for the purpose, we were still undamaged.
We were late for the scheduled passage up the Detroit River, which had been set to commence that forenoon, so we rang up 27 knots across Lake Erie. Sometimes we were making 27 and sometimes the best we could do was about 22. Lake Erie is the most shallow of the five Great Lakes and has an average depth of about ten fathoms. At that depth or more we could get our speed; in those places where the depth was less than ten fathoms, the stern settled and our energy was partially wasted in a shoal-water wash.
We entered the channel below Detroit in the early afternoon and the Coast Guard had very considerately kept open the downbound channels for us. There are two channels in portions of this strait between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, and only the downbound channels had water deep enough to take a ship of our draft. The lakers, of course, normally go up light and come down loaded with ore or grain.
It was quite a thrill to steam up the Detroit River past Detroit, under the high bridge, and out into Lake St. Clair. Then we entered the St. Clair River, past the St. Clair flats with the attractive homes and the boat clubs close by the channel, around the long “southeast bend” which is a big “S” curve with a goodly current, and on up to the northward toward Lake Huron.
The last two miles of the St. Clair River is another “S” curve, this time with a current of as much as eight or nine knots. It had grown dark by the time we got there, and it was an odd sensation to be making twelve knots through the water, with city lights close on each side, and hardly be moving. At the upper end, where Lake Huron empties into the St. Clair River, the current is the stiffest, running at what appeared to be a good nine knots. The passage under the bridge and out into the Lake entrance channel as it bends off to the left is a proper workout for any stranger to these waters.
In Lake Huron and Lake Michigan we carefully followed the tracks as laid out on the charts for “upbound” and “downbound” traffic and discovered it to be a most effective method of controlling the very heavy Lake traffic. We had no difficulty whatever with other ships in open water anywhere in the Lakes. And we did learn that some of the newly arriving saltwater cargo ships were not following the lakers’ customs and were causing some confusion.
One could use thousands of words in telling of Macon's visits to Chicago, to Milwaukee, to Cleveland, and to Buffalo. Each was a magnificent experience. The kindness and the genuine, eager interest of everyone whom we met cannot adequately be described. It made us all, every one on board, doubly proud to serve.
After we had left Chicago and Milwaukee and steamed back up Lake Michigan and down Lake Huron, we came again to the “rapids,” the informal local description of the upper end of the St. Clair River. With eight or nine knots of current behind us and ten to twelve knots of speed through the water to ensure crisp steering, we were not anxious to meet any traffic in the two-mile “S” curve from the River entrance down past the Canadian town of Sarnia. The Coast Guard was most obliging and we met upbound traffic only after we had traversed these first two miles and rounded the second bend. The channel is only 500 feet wide as it goes under the Blue Water Bridge at Port Huron, and whizzing down under the bridge at a combined current and ship’s speed of about twenty knots is not unlike the first slope on a roller coaster.
It was here in the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers on our downbound passage that we were recipients of a new and startling type of courtesy. The first time it happened was typical of the others.
We sighted an ore boat well out ahead, coming round a bend toward us. Then, on his port quarter, we sighted another ore boat, also upbound, making a knot or so more speed in the slow process of passing the first one.
We dutifully sounded one blast for a port-to-port passing and eased over to the right. Neither answered. The first ore boat eased a little to his right and that was no problem. The second one, instead of dropping back astern of the first, inched over to his left—our side of the channel.
We blew another one blast, and this time our Lakes pilot, a delightful and very capable retired Lakes shipmaster, said:
“Captain, they are giving you the middle. They know you are new up here and they don’t want to squeeze you against the banks.”
We inquired politely if our pilot had suddenly gone off his rocker, tried one more futile whistle signal, and succumbed. We took the middle. The two ore carriers tooled up past us, one on each side with a very scant 100 feet of clearance, the skippers and their wives waved cheerfully from their respective bridges as they passed, we waved back our not-very-blasé but fervent thanks, and on we went downstream.
It was in the southeast bend of the St. Clair River that we made our greatest speed-to-depth ratio. We were holding to ten knots on the engines to keep the steering lively in a following current, and the Navigator was dutifully plotting and checking as we went. We had a telephone direct from the fathometer to the upper open bridge and the soundings came up steadily. Somehow the technicians had tuned that instrument so it would read right down almost to zero. Readings of eight and ten feet under the keel we had become used to. Six feet made us perk up our ears and look twice at the chart. This time, at one point, the readings kept getting lower—five, four, three, and finally two feet under the keel.
It was not shown as rocky on the chart. We had four knots of current behind us, giving a total of fourteen knots over the ground, and backing down would only make the stern settle lower. Stop, and we would lose steering control. So we all spoke in whispers and hoped this evil prospect would go away. And pretty soon it did—three, four, five, and finally six or more feet. Then we relaxed and called for coffee all around.
In Cleveland, the authorities had worked strenuously to dredge out room for us alongside the dock. They made it on time. We sent our motorboat (fitted with a small yacht fathometer) in to reconnoiter, put the shipfitter over the side to get a good close look at the draft marks, whistled up our two YTBs (they were always on hand the few times we wanted them), and went on in. After we were moored, the lead lines confirmed the fathometer. We had a little over a foot more than our maximum draft. But it was worth the effort. We had on board about 140,000 visitors in six days. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Sometimes the waiting line was almost a mile long, bending back out of sight behind the huge Cleveland Stadium.
Visiting hours were stretched from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., and we had most of the visitors off by 11:00 o’clock at night. And the crew loved it. The many spontaneous letters of thanks that came in after these visits are priceless mementos for the whole ship’s company.
It was in Cleveland that the shipfitters finished rebuilding the propeller guards. We had started in Milwaukee, with commercial help, to double the strength of the bracings and face the guards more strongly. Wood facing, no matter how heavy, would not take the strain and someone, somehow, managed to promote a couple of lengths of railroad track. The Milwaukee concern bent these to shape for us and started the installation. The ship’s force finished the job in Cleveland, and we ended up with a piece of railroad track as the outboard facing of each propeller guard.
The St. Lawrence River, when we started back downstream, looked a little (but not much) wider than it had coming up and we sailed on down without incident except for the hair-curling episode at the Grass Island anchorage. This was the most difficult decision of the entire trip. The downbound schedule had been carefully planned so that there would be no need to anchor in the narrow reaches of the River where the bow would be headed upstream when the time came to resume the downstream passage. Then there developed a traffic jam at Beauharnois Locks with two dozen downbound ships, totaling eighteen lockages, filling all the available anchoring space in Lake St. Francis. The Beauharnois authorities could not assign Macon a lockage sequence number until she had cleared Snell Lock downbound. The problem was whether to make the mooring cells in the quiet water of the Wiley- Dondero Channel between the Eisenhower and Snell Locks and wait until traffic cleared, or try the Grass Island anchorage just below Cornwall Island. Ships native to the River use a stern anchor here, but we had no stern anchor. Since we had left over thirty downbound ships waiting behind us at the Welland Canal, the traffic could have taken a week or more to clear. So we locked through Snell and anchored below Grass Island where the usable water is about 1,200 feet wide for 2,000 feet and the current is about three to four knots. The arithmetic on this shows that when we got underway we had about six minutes to spin the ship 180° from a standing start. The very fine work of two YTBs, in addition to the engines, managed to get Macon’s bow between the downstream channel buoys after weighing anchor, but the Commanding Officer can still vividly see in his mind the spectacle of this ship with her bow grounded on one side of the channel and her stern on the other with a strong current holding her there until every photographer in the country got a good picture of it.
Clear of Grass Island and headed downstream again, we passed through the two locks at Beauharnois, crossed Lake St. Louis, and were lowered through Côte St. Catherine and St. Lambert Locks without incident.
With one night alongside the dock at Montreal, (where we cut off the special propeller guards because they would be below the waterline when we were fueled and down to normal draft again) and another alongside at Quebec, we worked our way downstream like the veterans we fondly thought we were.
And then one blessed day we found ourselves in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. There was no land in sight all around the horizon, and the depthsounder was reading fathoms instead of feet and inches.
A great big beautiful Navy oiler showed up on schedule and we settled comfortably alongside her at an easy 10 knots to drink our fill of fuel. Deep again at our proper draft, and stable in any sea, we set our course to round the eastern tip of Nova Scotia and then reach back westerly toward Boston to retrieve our topmast radars before starting out again across the Atlantic.
We had steamed over 3,000 miles up the River, into the Lakes, and back again in fresh water. And while we were up in the Lakes we had been the highest cruiser in the world, 582 feet someone figured it, and this is high enough for any man-of-war.
A graduate of the U. S. Naval Academy in the Class of 1932, Captain Wylie is currently serving in SACLANT headquarters. He had extensive World War II duty in destroyers, has been both a student and a member of the staff at the Naval War College, was commanding officer of Macon during Operation Inland Seas. On two occasions he has won Honorable Mention in the Naval Institute’s Prize Essay Contest.