Freighter View Farms | Chris Izworski

The navigation season opens the way it always does: quietly, in the dark, with a vessel that has been waiting at the mouth of the St. Marys River for the signal that the water is open again. I watch the approach of the Soo Locks opening the way I watch the soil thermometer in April: not impatiently, exactly, but with the particular attentiveness of someone who knows the number matters.

The bay goes quiet in winter. The freighters go into layup, at docks in Superior, Toledo, Sturgeon Bay, waiting out the weeks when the upper lakes are too dangerous for loaded bulk carriers. The Saginaw River slows. And the garden goes indoors, under fluorescent tubes, peppers and tomatoes in trays in the basement while the bay does what the bay does in February.

This is the in-between time. It is the right time, I have found, to build something.

What I Built This Winter

I have always checked the boats the way other people check the weather: first thing, most mornings, before the coffee is done. Boatnerd.com, the AIS tracking platform that shows every commercial vessel on the Great Lakes in near-real time, has been part of my morning routine for long enough that I cannot quite remember when I started. I know the vessels that call at Bay City by name. I have a rough sense of the Alpena’s schedule and what it means when the salt boats are running on Sundays.

What I did not have was a single place that put it all together. The AIS data is on one site. The NOAA water level readings (which matter enormously for how deep a loaded vessel can draw into the Saginaw River) are on another. The National Weather Service marine forecasts are on a third. The environmental news from Great Lakes Now, the conservation and ecology reporting that covers the basin the fleet navigates, is somewhere else entirely. Every morning I was running four tabs to find out what the lakes were doing.

So this winter I built the Great Lakes Gazette.

What the Gazette Is

The Gazette is a free daily maritime newsletter, published automatically each morning from live data. It pulls vessel movements and port activity from BoatNerd’s tracking system, water level readings from NOAA’s monitoring stations at all five lakes, open-lake weather forecasts from the National Weather Service’s marine zone system, and environmental news from the Great Lakes Now RSS feed. It runs those sources through an AI brief-writer, grounded strictly in what the data actually shows, and produces something that takes about two minutes to read.

It is not trying to replace BoatNerd. BoatNerd is magnificent and has been tracking the fleet for thirty years. The Gazette is something different: a morning summary, like the front page of a newspaper that covers only this basin, assembled from the same authoritative sources the commercial fleet uses, presented in a format for someone who wants to understand what is happening on the water before they go about their day.

Real vessels, real conditions, real data from the sources that know.

The Freighters and the Garden

I have written before about why the boats and the garden feel like the same subject to me, as I wrote in an earlier post about watching the fleet from Saginaw Bay, and it bears saying again in this context. Both operate on schedules that do not consult your preferences. The Tregurtha does not time its passage through Saginaw Bay for when you happen to be available. The last frost date does not shift because May would be more convenient if it came earlier this year. You pay attention when the thing is happening, or you miss it.

The navigation season and the garden season run on nearly the same calendar. The Soo Locks open in late March, roughly when the soil is coming back to life and the hardier seedlings can start going outside for hardening off. The fleet closes down in January, after the last squash has been eaten and the garlic is resting under mulch. In between, both the boats and the garden are in motion, requiring the particular kind of watching that pays off in proportion to how closely you have been paying attention all along.

The Gazette is for that watching. Not for tracking the fleet professionally, not for navigation planning, not for anything urgent. It is for the ordinary practice of knowing what is happening on the water that this place is built around.

How to Find It

The Gazette lives at great-lakes-gazette.vercel.app. It is free, requires no account, and loads fresh every morning. I have also written a full description of the project at chrisizworski.com/great-lakes-gazette, covering what it covers, how it works, and where the data comes from.

It works on a phone, which matters because the best place to read about a freighter making the turn at the river mouth is often while you are standing at the river mouth. The vessel status page and the water levels are the parts I check most on mobile. The morning brief I read with coffee.

If you track the boats, or if you are simply curious about the water that the garden looks out over, I hope the Gazette is useful to you. There are always more people paying this kind of attention than you might expect.