It’s 6:45 am and its pouring rain outside. In short, my routine of leaving early to walk the woods in search of birds makes no sense. Instead, I am comfortably ensconced in front of the fireplace. The NE wind is blowing in off Lake Superior, and given Gitche Gumee’s water temperature is 37F, the air temperature outside 1/2 mile from the lake is 45F. Now you understand the fireplace. Our furnace is turned off, and heat is required!

One of my most loyal readers, Bonnie, commented upon yesterday’s “boat post“. As many others of you have commented favorably in the past about my nautical writings away from topics about out feathered friends, here is this morning’s “boats, not birds” follow-up! In addition to the resources noted in yesterday’s blog post, for a few dollars on either the IOS or Android platforms, one may purchase apps which track ship movement worldwide. These apps should incorporate AIS (Automatic Identification System – Wikipedia link) and Google Maps. On my Android smartphone and tablet, I have installed “MarineTraffic“.  This Marine Traffic link opens their web site which displays ships on any platform via a web browser (Android, IOS or PC … kind of cool!). Move the map around and zoom in somewhere. There is a whole lot of boat traffic on the high seas! On smartphones or tablets, their app work much faster and provides more data than the web site.