Quote Originally Posted by SAnd View Post
Under the right conditions the ice heaves and cracks. It makes a truly awesome sound that is hard to describe.


I have heard that on Superior, and I spent a lot of years living 2 blocks off the Lake Michigan shore-line. Not as much ice of course but...still "plenty-o-crackin'".

I don't even know how to describe this and I can't do it justice in the time I have at the moment but in brief, I rented a remote cabin ~5-6 years ago off-the-beaten path far up the North Shore. The cabin was maybe 15' away from the shore-line and maybe 15' - 20' above the water, a very narrow band of physical distance between the lake surface and the human being (me and a chic).

Dead of night and a storm flares-up, or maybe "materializes out of nowhere" is a better way to say it, it just sort of "morphed and evolved" and swallowed-up everything in its enormity and violence in a seconds time but...it was above the lake and below my body position, a massive, violent, Hellish storm maybe only 10' - 12' thick. The deafening sound and volume of electrical discharge is not even something I can translate in-writing (ya' had to be there) and the brutality of the lake water churn and wave action was mind-bending in magnitude. All this chaos, yet below me, and sandwiched in this narrow, compressed space, just breath-taking, I was in awe. And amidst all this, barely a wisp of wind hit me where I was perched on the cliff watching all this this unfold, literally just feet away, as if a glass barrier was in-place.

I've been through OK & TX tornado's, FL hurricanes, cyclones in the Far East etc. but damn...this was one of the most violent, strange and in-my-face experiences I've ever had with momma nature...doubt I'll ever see anything like it again in my life-time.

Anyway, I toss that out there because during all this I remember seeing lights on a few great lakes freighters out on the dark horizon, off in the distance, just doing their thing and all I could think of was holy f***, these cats literally live-n-die with this shit, you couldn't pay me enough to do that more than once (I couldn't afford to keep buying underwear) and yeah...the Edmund Fitzgerald rattled thru my brain. To even think about what that ship and crew must have endured on that fateful night to take her down...man…my head would have exploded.

Lake Superior...yup...she’s one tough, deep and really cold bitch but...just fucking beautiful to sail if you have skipper worth his salt.