American Spirit - Intimidating Sight in the Night

Here is the American Spirit seen departing Duluth around 3:00am on the morning of April 22, 2023. As seen in a video I uploaded a few days ago, she had awoken from her winter slumber earlier in the evening and made the short trip from the Elevator M dock in Superior to the Cenovus fuel dock in Duluth. Now here she was setting out empty to start her season, bound for Two Harbors just up the Lake Superior coastline to load taconite (iron ore pellets). The taconite was scheduled for eventual delivery to Conneaut, Ohio on the south shore of Lake Erie.

If you followed the progress of the American Spirit during the 2022-2023 shipping season, you will have been aware that she was having engine issues for the final months of the season... often seen running on one engine. For this departure, we can see exhaust coming out of both stacks, which means that hopefully those issues were fixed over the winter... and she has nothing but smooth sailing ahead!

I shot this video from the north pier at Canal Park to get that straight-on shot of her bow as she made the turn to line up with the canal. There's something very intimidating about seeing such a massive bulk in the darkness pointed straight at you. But fortunately this steel giant didn't mean any harm and even gave us a rare late night salute. She either received a new horn over the winter months or was using her backup horn for this departure. I like the "breathy" sound of the horn, almost as if she needs to clear her throat before each blast.

Note: The Aerial Lift Bridge did give a reply salute, but it was terribly distorted so I removed it from my footage. While I have nothing against the bridge salutes, we hear them so often that I feel I can pick and choose which ones I want to put in the videos. In this case, I feel a highly-distorted salute would have ruined the atmosphere of the nighttime video.

The 1004-foot American Spirit was the seventh of thirteen 1000-footers built for Great Lakes services. She was launched as the George A. Stinson in 1978, eventually being renamed the American Spirit in 2004. According to the American Steamship Company website she is "powered by two Pielstick 16-cylinder, 8000 horsepower (each), four cycle, heavy fuel-burning diesel engines. The vessel uses a conveyor system below its cargo holds to transport cargo to a "loop conveyor" system that elevates the cargo to the massive deck-mounted boom conveyor. For maneuvering in port, the vessel is equipped with a 1,000 HP bow thruster." She has a mid-summer capacity of 62,400 tons. Her 260-foot self-unloading boom can discharge cargo at a rate of 10,000 tons per hour.

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