Spring in Michigan: Watch Soo Locks Opening for the 2025 Season

As Michigan's Great Lakes get warmer and warmer, residents are excited for swimming and fishing. But it's really an exciting day for Michigan's biggest boats, barges and freighters. This morning the Soo Locks opened to commercial shipping for the season at 7:55 a.m. after being closed since January 16th for regular winter maintenance.

Get our free mobile app

Carrie Fox from the United States Army Corps of Engineers hosted a live Facebook feed of the event as it happened. The first commercial vessel during the 2025 Soo Locks Opening Great Lakes Shipping Season will be the Clyde S. Vanenkevort/Erie Trader which is a unique duo called an articulated tug/barge combo. They are basically a team with the tugboat assisting with propelling and moving the bigger vessel.

The Clyde S. Vanenkevort/Erie Trader arrived yesterday afternoon and dropped anchor around 2 p.m. This put them first in line for when the Soo Locks's biggest section, known as the Poe Lock, which just opened this morning right around 8 a.m. You can watch as Fox and others from the United States Army Corps of Engineers' Detroit District explain the process of getting the first ship through the lock for the season.

The ship honored with the title of first one through, as I mentioned earlier, is a tug-barge combo. Built in 2008, the Clyde S. Vanenkevort is the tugboat which has an overall length of 130 feet. That's a mighty tugboat to navigate the 740-foot long Erie Trader which was built in 2012. That gives the combo a combined length of 870 feet.