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.
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.
Les personnes dans le ciel de Captain Oat
Captain Oat
GGrandpa CorneliusCaptain Oat had a grandfather named Cornelius, who was fond…
TThe twenty-nine menThe lost crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald whose memory he carr…
JJohn Harrison
AAlexander McDougall
FFather Ingalls
GGordon Lightfoot
SSixto Rodriguez
""Roaring" Dan Seavey
KKris Draper
EErnie Harwell
Lieux
33 lieux
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.