Early December, and the salties are on the move, scooping up the last of their cargoes and heading east to the ocean before the St. Lawrence seaway closes for the winter.  We are on the go too, wheat for Sorel, Quebec from Thunder Bay.  It is a five day journey to get there and we are due back for two more loads before our sailing season finishes, sometime in mid-January.  It is almost entirely the same route downbound as it is upbound, the same forward as it is in reverse, giving these trips a palindromic feel.  Just as the trips are the same, so are the days.  They become enameled with a somnambulatory glaze and almost impossible to distinguish from one another.  

Of course shit happens everywhere, but at sea especially.  The weather will often throw a spanner in our works to shake things up. A massive storm system two weeks ago saw every ship on the Great Lakes seeking shelter. As the temperature plummets machinery begins to fail.  And there are acts of God and accidents.   Like yesterday, a ship aground in the Livingstone Channel has meant that the whole of the St. Clair and the Detroit Rivers are backed up with downbound traffic, vessels at anchor and alongside, delays that will cost millions of dollars cumulatively.  We have been tied up 24hours already, twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the all-clear to be given so we can let go our wires and get underway again.  

Up north the cold has settled in, but as we work our way south the freeze eases, winter has yet to dig its heels in fully and there are still days where the mercury lingers above zero.  We have been given tasters here and there.  The odd flurry of snow.  Bitter winds.  A thin, sheen of ice across the decks in the early morning.  

When visible, we sailors have a close relationship with the celestial bodies. If clear, the winter sky is incandescently bright, blindingly so if you’re steering the American narrows or any other eastbound route at sunrise. When divested of warmth, all the suns nurturing tendencies disappear and the world is cast in a stark and naked light. Soon, the teeming, wild shorelines will be covered in thick snow, but just now they look like the ransacked larders of war-time homes.

Leaving Thunder Bay on the first of the month in the early evening, and the moon was full over the Sleeping Giant causeway.  Crossing Lake Superior that night, it hid behind clouds but was still bright enough to illuminate the way and gaps in the cumulus canopy meant that the lake’s black face blushed a shimmering silver in the lambent light.  

Over the next weeks we’ll see the moon dress and undress, wax and wane. It will be full again before this trick is done.