Edwin Gott

Miles away across the Mackinac Straits, from our hotel room in Saint Ignace. Not bad for a handheld photo using a long lens. While the St. Ignace Holiday Inn Express is not a great shipwatching location, we saw a half-dozen or so ships passing by Mackinac Island during our stay last weekend.

That bumper in the foreground is one of four at the boundary of the Saint Ignace harbor. A sign in town tells that they were an anchorage for tankers delivering jet fuel for Kincheloe (originally Kinross) Air Force Base (now Chippewa County International Airport). Iven Kincheloe, the first man to fly an aircraft above 100,000 feet, was one of my childhood heroes, a test pilot and fighter ace raised in Southwest Michigan. Like many of the Edwards AFB test pilots, he died far too young, in his case doing an early test of the F-104 Starfighter. I was nine when he died, and mourned him for years. Still do, actually.