Ship to winter at Monroe’s port

Ship to winter at Monroe’s port

■ The Manistee’s layover for maintenance work is the first time in decades a lake freighter will spend the colder months at Monroe.

BY CHARLES SLAT


For the first time in decades, a lake freighter is wintering over at the Port of Monroe.

The 690-foot-long Manistee docked at the port on Friday and is expected to stay the winter while undergoing maintenance.

“This is really the first ship we’ve had here in a long time,” said Kimberly Schaefer, adminis­trative assistant at the port.

While berthed here, the com­modities carrier owned by Grand River Navigation of Avon Lake, Ohio, will be worked on by H Hansen Industries, a ship repair firm from Toledo.

Tony LaMantia, owner and president of Hansen, said the Manistee docked at Monroe be­cause of a worsening shortage of facilities where ships can lay over for the winter season.

“A lot of the yards in the Great Lakes are closing,” he said. At Toledo, freighters once were al­lowed to winter along the Mau­mee River, but that doesn’t hap­pen as much due to liability issues, he said.

“At Monroe, they were recep­tive and really worked with us,” he said.

He said the Manistee should be at the port into March when the shipping season resumes. The Great Lakes shipping season usually ends in mid-January as heavier ice and higher vessel in­surance rates idle most ships.

Work on the Manistee will include a lot of steel work, par­ticularly in the cargo holds, and mechanical work as well, Mr. La-Mantia said. While its here, the port will get some freighter dock­age revenue for the first time in years.

Mr. LaMantia said he started with the Hansen in 1957 and bought the company in 1980. He has memories of Monroe as a bustling port. “It was quite a port at one time,” he said. “I can re­member the first year I worked there, all we had was a trail­er to work out of, but I think Hansen’s had more than 400 employees working out of Monroe.” Today, the com­pany’s total work force is about 120.

He said six freighters typi­cally would lay over at Mon­roe for the winter, rafted to­gether in groups of three.

The Manistee “sails all over the Great Lakes,” Mr. LaMantia said. “It’s one of the older vessels on the lakes.”

The vessel, built for $2.2 million in 1943 at River Rouge, initially was named the Adirondack. It was owned by the Reiss Steam­ship Co. and soon was re­named the Richard J. Reiss, and carried coal. In 1964, it was converted to a self-un­loading vessel and carried limestone and iron ore.

In 1964, it was converted to a self-unloader. Then, in 1969, Reiss sold all of its ships to the American Steamship Co. In 2003, the ship was acquired by Ogle­bay Norton and then sold in 2004 to Grand River Naviga­tion for $1.8 million. In 2005, it was rechristened the Manistee.

It has a 2,950-horsepower diesel engine, is 60 feet wide and has 16 hatches that feed into six compartments, ca­pable of carrying a total of 14,900 tons.

Although various barges have docked periodically at the Port of Monroe in recent years, this is the first long-term layover of a freighter since the Sharon, an American Steamship freighter, was mothballed at the port in the early 1980s and later scrapped, Ms. Schaefer said.