Departments

Join our mailing list

* indicates required

Tags Matching:

Great Lakes

  • Originally published 06/18/2013

    Michigan abuzz over shipwreck search

    FAIRPORT, MICH. — Commercial fisherman Larry Barbeau’s comings and goings usually don’t create much of a stir in this wind-swept Lake Michigan outpost, but in the past few days, his phone jangles the minute he arrives home.Barbeau’s 46-foot boat is the offshore nerve center for an expedition seeking the underwater grave of the Griffin, the first ship of European design to traverse the upper Great Lakes. Built on orders of legendary French explorer Rene Robert Cavelier de la Salle, it ventured from Niagara Falls to Lake Michigan’s Green Bay but disappeared during its return in 1679.Divers this weekend opened a pit at the base of a wooden beam that juts nearly 11 feet from the lake bottom, believing it could be a section of the vessel, the rest presumably entombed in mud. They picked up the pace Monday with more powerful equipment after a weekend of probing showed that whatever is buried is deeper than sonar readings indicated....

  • Originally published 04/30/2013

    French tourism campaign "ignores" Sword Beach

    D-Day veterans have criticised French tourism officials after they unveiled a new promotional campaign about the Normandy landings which ignores one of the beaches where British troops went ashore.The initiative covers only four of the five areas where Allied forces landed on 6th June 1944, omitting 'Sword' beach, where almost 700 British troops were killed or wounded.The new campaign was launched earlier this month by six tourist boards along the Normandy coast. They have joined up to create an area they are promoting with the slogan of the landings’ “secteur mythique” (mythical sector). This stretches from Utah in the west, across all the other beaches where troops came ashore but stops short of Sword, at the eastern end.It also excludes a part of the adjacent Juno beach, where Canadians soldiers invaded, as well as drop zones further inland where airborne troops landed by parachute or glider, including the area around Pegasus Bridge....