Lieutenant Mike Patterson, commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Katmai Bay, took in the frozen scene from the wheelhouse of his ship. Out the windows, freighters pointing up- and downriver stood still. The little ferry to Sugar Island was trapped in port and calling for help. None of them looked like they'd be moving anytime soon: The St. Marys River was iced up.



Ricky Rhodes

The ice had moved in overnight. It blew south out of Lake Superior and piled up in Whitefish Bay, then slid out of the bay and into the St. Marys. In blocks and bergs it tumbled down the rapids and through the stone raceways of the Soo Locks. Then, two miles below the locks, where the river funnels into a narrow channel called Little Rapids Cut, the ice got stuck. It piled on top of itself, jammed tight, and turned the smooth-running black water of the river into the jagged white parking lot that was stalling the freighters and ferries.

"Good," Patterson said. "This is exactly what we want to see."

Katmai Bay is based in Sault Ste. Marie ("Soo Saint Muh-REE"), Michigan—350 miles due north of Detroit across the St. Marys from Canada. All told, the U.S. Coast Guard operates nine icebreakers on the Great Lakes. The American industrial centers of Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee line the shores and rivers of Huron, Erie, Superior, Michigan, and Ontario, and their mountains of ore, coal, steel, and grain mostly come and go by ship. Beginning in mid-December, the lakes begin to freeze over. If the ice gets too thick, the ships stop, and if the ships stop, a big chunk of the economy stops. Someone has to keep it moving. Despite five-month winters and subzero temperatures, Coasties volunteer to serve here and break the ice year after year.

Patterson, who has broken ice for five winters and is based at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington, D.C., ordered Katmai Bay into action. From the pier in Sault Ste. Marie, the crew of sixteen revved up the ship's twin 2,500-hp Fairbanks Morse diesel engines to deliver maximum torque to Katmai Bay's eight-foot-diameter propeller. Her bow lifted above the water and her stern sank into the hole the propeller was churning in the river. Katmai Bay kicked in seconds from a dead stop to near her top speed of fourteen knots—not exactly Ferrari-like, but more than enough to knock a greenhorn on his butt. The crew, though, all of them veterans of at least one full winter aboard the Katmai Bay, didn't even reach for handholds as the helmsman turned her toward the ice in a tight, smooth arc, straightening just before she hit.

"If you beat the piss out of [a ship] for seven years, you can't really complain."

The impact hardly registered to those aboard. But the ice below scattered like a clowder of frightened cats. Chunks the size of milk crates pinged off the inch-thick steel hull and rolled away in the wake, grinding together like huge teeth. Table-sized plates of ice, a foot thick or more, splintered against the bow. Some pieces got sucked into the prop and exploded out with wet bangs. Whipping the ship's wheel back and forth as if he were driving slalom in a BMW, the helmsman made Katmai Bay's rudder swing left and right, or sally. She rolled violently side to side, sending huge waves shoreward, shaking up the locked ice as she went.

Katmai Bay spent two hours running a half dozen loops through the ice pack, a maneuver called racetracking. The goal wasn't to plow open a channel through Little Rapids Cut, but something more strategic: to loosen the traffic jam of ice just enough to let the river do the hard work of carrying it away.

Even with GPS and radar, the crew still count on analog equipment as backup Ricky Rhodes

A lot of ice breaking works like that. It's as much about outthinking the ice as outmuscling it. After Little Rapids Cut, Patterson ordered Katmai Bay farther downriver to where the St. Marys widens to more than a mile. Here the shipping channel had become a narrow strip of water surrounded by vast prairies of fast ice, solid ice frozen to the river bottom or shore. But it was only wide enough to let a single ship pass. The last thing Patterson wanted to do was break off a huge piece of ice and have it jam the channel, so he directed the helmsman to "scarf the edge"—shave down the lip of ice with the ship's hull.

It's tricky work, scarfing. Katmai Bay may seem like a floating bulldozer—implacable force, unbending steel—but, as you try to carve a straight line down the edge of the ice, the ice keeps flicking all 662 tons of the ship back into the channel. Try to swing back in, and the tail slips out from beneath you and the ship slides out into the soft water. Steering Katmai Bay then is done more by feel than by thought, like riding a surfboard. The trick isn't brute force. It's balancing your force against nature's.

Still, you do need muscle. The Great Lakes experience some of the worst winter conditions in the country: The freezing temperatures and arctic storms can produce ice five feet thick—and twice that where drifting sheets crash and form pressure ridges in the same way that mountains rise at tectonic seams. Last April, the Coast Guard's heaviest icebreaker, Mackinaw, was put out of commission when one of its propulsion units was holed by the ice and a seal started leaking. Though, as one crewman fairly pointed out, "If you beat the piss out of [a ship] for seven years, you can't really complain."

Ricky Rhodes

Last winter, Katmai Bay ended up working until early May. The one before that, in 2013 to 2014—the most savage in living memory—ice lingered in Lake Superior well into June. In the worst of that winter, the St. Marys was choked with van-sized bergs and littered with stranded ships, and a trip that in clear water would have taken five hours took her eight days. "Very seldom in a craft this capable do you come up against ice that is your better," Patterson recalled. "It was humbling."

But on this April day, Katmai Bay humbled the ice. As we turned north for home, the oil tanker Algocanada steamed past heading for a refinery south of Port Huron. Back in Sault Ste. Marie, the Sugar Island ferry was back up and running. The St. Marys River was open to traffic again—until the next slew of ice rode in from Superior, clogging the narrow waters on which the country's steel and grain travel. Then the crew of the Katmai Bay would start its engines once more.

This story appears in the March 2016 issue of Popular Mechanics.



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