Lake Erie on a perfect June day may not look perilous, but looks can be deceiving.
“When it blows up on Lake Erie, it blows up quick,” said Christine Seuffert, who led Ashtabula’s 77th annual Blessing of the Fleet.
Since the 1940s, Ashtabula residents in the very northeast corner of Ohio have gathered where its namesake river flows into Lake Erie. After the lake thaws, and the freighters set sail, those residents throw a memorial wreath into the harbor for fallen sailors, and a retired priest from the local Catholic Church leads prayers of protection from the perils of the deep.
The lake’s shallow water means storms make waves much faster and closer together than on the ocean. Federal seaway pilot Gunar Luhta sat quietly in the audience. He experienced the rough seas of Lake Erie on Christmas Eve 25 years ago.
“We were taking waves over the top of the pilot house. We lost our lifeboat, lost everything except for our GPS, lost our radar, and was able to navigate into the harbor using an old paper chart,” he said.
Luhta said his job is only getting busier every year. Even in the age of planes, trains and automobiles, more than 2 billion tons of the goods consumers and businesses buy move by ship. Coastal ports tend to steal the spotlight, because that’s where the stuff bought on Amazon tends to come into the country. But the Great Lakes and inland waterways carry nearly 700 million tons of cargo
every year, according to the American Great Lakes Ports Association.
“A lot of steel and a lot of grain, those are the primary things, but there's also project cargo, like windmill parts, mast sections, and blades for windmills and engines and all sorts of stuff,” Luhta said. | 
