TOOLS TRADE
OF
THE
Anchors,
alight and aweigh
10
| NORTH STAR PORT | FALL 2024
uring a stormy Lake Superior night on Nov. 18, 1985, the 585-foot-long Liberian-flagged freighter Socrates,
pushed by gale-force winds, blew off its anchor position and onto the beach of Duluth's Minnesota Point (aka
Park Point). The ship was stuck in the sand about 100 feet from shore for six days. Backhoes removed sand so
tugboats could pull the grounded vessel off and get it refloated.
Afterward, Socrates underwent repairs for some holes in a forward ballast tank but otherwise was relatively unscathed. Esti-
mates at the time were that it cost the ship's owner about $500,000 (about $1 million in today's dollars) in lost time and to pay
for tugboats and barges to free the vessel. Had the grounding location been a rocky shore instead of a sandbar, the story could
have been far worse, with the possibility of injuries, a major spill, or the vessel broken and lost.
D
PHOTOS / Ken Moran, Univ. of Minn. Duluth; Jayson Hron ILLUSTRATION / Michael Iver Jacobsen
| By Richard Dow Stewart, Ph.D.
