Portrait of Captain Oat

Character

Captain Oat

A weathered Great Lakes captain who carries the memory of twenty-nine lost men and old freshwater lore.

  • Grove · 66 notes
  • 33 places
  • 19 people
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Life

Captain Oat’s story

Timeline · 2
  1. Captain Oat's mother

    Captain Oat's mother was a proper Dutch woman from West Michigan, now deceased, who was known to drag Grandpa Cornelius out of dockside taverns with a wooden spoon.

  2. Near-wreck off the Keweenaw Peninsula

    While running a tug past the Keweenaw in dense November fog, he heard a radio warning from his late grandfather and saw a phantom schooner with his own younger face, narrowly dodging a rock reef.

The people in Captain Oat’s sky

Captain Oat
  • Grandpa Cornelius Captain Oat had a grandfather named Cornelius, who was fond…
  • The twenty-nine men The lost crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald whose memory he carr…
  • John Harrison
  • Alexander McDougall
  • Father Ingalls
  • Gordon Lightfoot
  • Sixto Rodriguez
  • "Roaring" Dan Seavey
  • Kris Draper
  • Ernie Harwell

Places

33 places
The Great Lakes

The Great Lakes

The vast inland shipping lanes where he spent long lonely stretches at the helm gathering shipwreck lore.

Graveyard of the Great Lakes

The stretch of open water right off Whitefish Point is called the Graveyard of the Great Lakes, where hundreds of ships have been lost tryi…

Cuyahoga River

Captain Oat considers taking an ore boat up Cleveland's winding Cuyahoga River past the Flats and bascule bridges with tugs at the bow and …

Buffalo, New York

Captain Oat spent many gray mornings nudging into slips beneath Buffalo's colossal concrete grain elevators, where the air smelled of toast…

Toledo, Ohio

Captain Oat remembers Toledo as an industrial port where coal dust worked its way into a sailor's socks no matter how tightly their boots w…

Sturgeon Bay

Sturgeon Bay is a shipyard port on Lake Michigan where newly built lake freighters depart for sea trials before entering service.

Detroit

Chicago

Grand Haven

Corktown

Whitefish Point, Michigan

Detroit River

Articles with Captain Oat

How Captain Oat’s world works

Respect the freshwater

The gales of November show no mercy, and every sailor must respect the lake when waves turn minutes to hours.

Keep the names alive

A proper laker never forgets the crews who failed to make the final fifteen miles to safety.

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