MARITIME COMMUNITY

The maritime community in North America is fairly tight knit as a shipping community. On the Great Lakes ships are crossing from Canada to USA and back again several times during a voyage from Montreal to Duluth as the most upper port in the Great Lakes system. In the Saint Lawrence Seaway the cooperation between USA and Canada is even more evident as some of the locks are on the Canadian side and some are on the USA side of the border. Even though you have this kind of open system for ships movement there is still a lot of security behind. Modern technology has enabled us to have a very good control with movement of people and ships. AIS has helped with this and also the ships reporting system with all the changes made to security onboard made it a lot easier to control the flow of people coming and going.

As an example; if I want to put a parcel onboard a ship while she is transiting the Seaway, I will have to inform and get permission from the Seaway authority with the consent from the ship master. The master has to present to the Seaway Authority a list of personnel that will be attending the ship while in transit. All personnel entering onto Seaway property must conform to their regulation for security and safety.
The flow of cargo to and from the Great Lakes port all have to enter into or exit the Seaway System and locks in Montreal, Canada.  Some cargo ships built for the Great Lakes are never exiting as they are on regular trade routes within the Great Lakes and have no need to exit. Some cannot exit as they are too large for the Seaway Locks in the Welland canal and also in the locks between Lake Ontario and Montreal. These ships are mostly dry bulk cargo ships transporting coal and other commodities within the Great Lakes. The crew and officers on these ships are of US and Canadian nationality.

In the latter years we have seen increase in barge traffic on the lower “Lakes”, mostly handled by push boats. The cargo is mixed of dry and liquid bulk.

Foreign ships entering into the Great Lakes have to conform to Saint Lawrence Seaway regulation. To verify and approve a vessel, a joint USA and Canada inspection is performed in Montreal on the first voyage of the navigation season. The ship and crew are inspected and approved for the season. However a inspector is still verifying the ship while in first lock on each voyage inbound Great Lakes. Since the international ballast regulation came into effect and also since a joint Canada/USA ballast control system came online for the Great Lakes, verification at same time as Seaway inspection is also done. The US and Canadian Seaway Inspectors are filling out a ballast report conforming to both US and Canadian regulations. Vessel will have to keep log of all sampling of new ballast to make sure that salt level is sufficiently high.

Note Following:

As a website completely independent of Government and Shipping companies, Maritime Community is planning to put some time into writing about the various segments of the Saint Lawrence River and Great Lakes, the companies and technologies involved in this area.