James R. Barker - Massive 70-second Salute

Here is the James R. Barker seen departing Duluth-Superior on the morning of May 20, 2022. She had picked up a load of low-sulfur coal at the Midwest Energy Terminal in Superior, WI and was scheduled to deliver the load to the power plant at St. Clair, Michigan. (Her arrival the evening before was covered in a previous upload on this channel.) The video starts shortly after the Barker has left the Midwest Energy dock and is making her way across the St. Louis River Bay. She passes the General Mills and CHS grain docks before making her way under the John A. Blatnik bridge. We then see her again at Canal Park in Duluth, where she passes under the historic Aerial Lift Bridge and makes her way onto Lake Superior.

As we've now come to expect from the James R. Barker, we got another massive master salute (three long and two short blasts) on departure. From start to end, I timed this salute to be 70 seconds in length! These giant salutes have made the Barker one of the favorites of ship watchers in the Twin Ports, perhaps even rivaling the popularity of her fleet mate (and Queen of the Lakes), the Paul R. Tregurtha. I originally planned to hold onto this footage for the winter layup period in early 2023, but after reviewing it again I realized that salute was just too good to hold back for eight or nine months!

While the Barker departed the Duluth shipping canal, the 1000-foot Burns Harbor was making another of her regular visits to Superior, Wisconsin for loading taconite. As is often the case, one waits a long time for a ship to arrive or depart, then suddenly you have two moving at the same time at different ends of the harbor... forcing you to choose which one to see. While I couldn't be in both places at once, I did turn my camera 180 degrees to catch her approaching the lighthouse at Wisconsin Point. With the Superior entry over six miles away, I pushed my camera to the maximum to catch sight of her. But hopefully this perspective shows the size of the Burns Harbor compared to the lighthouse outside the Superior entry.

The James R. Barker is 1004 feet in length and was built in 1976 by the American Ship Building Company of Lorain, Ohio. According to the Boatnerd website, she is powered by "two 8,000 bhp V-16 cylinder, four stroke cycle, single acting, turbocharged Colt-Pielstick PC2V diesel engines, built by Fairbanks Morse Engine Division of Colt Industries, Beloit, WI driving through a Falk reversing gear box to two Bird-Johnson controllable pitch, stainless steel, four bladed propellers seventeen feet, six inches in diameter." She has a cargo capacity of 63,300 tons. She has the distinction of being the first self-contained 1000-footer to be built with the entire superstructure at the aft end of the vessel. This design would be the model the remaining 1000-footers to be built for Great Lakes service.
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