Here is the Wilfred Sykes seen departing Duluth, Minnesota on the afternoon of December 28, 2023. She had arrived just after midnight (as seen in an earlier video on my channel) to load taconite pellets at the Canadian National dock in West Duluth. After loading was complete, she was outbound with Indiana Harbor as her eventual destination for delivering her cargo.

With this being the first of two visits to Duluth in the 2023-2024 shipping season, the Sykes' crew was ready to put on a show for the crowd gathered in Canal Park. The captain even made a radio call to the bridge to say "We're going to be blowing a lot of salutes here today." The Sykes started out with a master salute consisting of three long and two short blasts, which the Aerial Lift Bridge answered in return. She then launched in two more salutes, a long-short-short-short-long salute and a long-long-long-short salute. I don't know if these two salutes signified anything with their sequence... or if the captain was just having fun with the crowd. To cap it off, she blew a final master salute as she made her way down the canal towards Lake Superior. It's nice to see the crew having a good time and making the most of their rare visit to Duluth!

The 678-foot Wilfred Sykes was built in 1949 by the American Shipbuilding Company of Lorain, Ohio. She was the first American lake carrier built after World War II and was in many ways she signaled a new age in Great Lakes shipping. Her two steam turbine engines produce a combined 7,700 horsepower, burning "bunker C" heavy fuel oil instead of coal, making her the first laker to do so. (Several lakers would later be retrofitted to burn fuel oil, but the Sykes was the first laker designed to do so from her conception.) She has 18 hatch covers that access six cargo holds capable of holding 21,500 tons of cargo. The Sykes was converted to a self-unloader in 1975 and given a 250-foot self-unloading boom. She is one of five steam-powered lake carriers still in service, with the others being the Alpena, Arthur M. Anderson, Cason J. Callaway, and Philip R. Clarke. (The Callaway was laid up in 2021, however, with an uncertain future.) All five have been documented on this channel, so check through my videos to see them in action!
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