Great Lake Warriors

[Avenger]

Great Lake Warriors premiers tomorrow on History channel.

www.history.com/shows/great-lake-warriors

Why wasn't I informed?

Not that it matters. I'm co-axially challenged. But I thought our freshwater friends would like to know. Right Willy?

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Oops...that is actually on our calendar so we don't forget to watch it.

Willy was going to notify everyone tomorrow of it so they would know and not forget...ppat

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7/19 - The protagonist of many a children’s book, the tugboat has an almost cute reputation as the maritime world’s little helper, dutifully pushing and pulling barges from port to port. “Most people think it’s a glamorous job; you go out on the water and see the sunset,” said Capt. John Selvick, owner of tugboat company Calumet River Fleeting in Chicago.

“They don’t see the 20- or 30-foot waves,” Selvick added. “They don’t see when the storms pick up. Or when you’re out there in the winter and the tug’s icing up, and you gotta get out there with baseball bats and axes.”

And most people don’t see their 19-year-old brother drown in Lake Michigan, after a tug flips upside down in 30-some-degree water. “I was the only one on deck who survived,” said Selvick, 60, who also lost his grandfather in a separate incident on Lake Michigan.

The harsh, dangerous reality of tugboat life is chronicled in History Channel’s “Great Lake Warriors.” The new docu-series follows Selvick and other tugboat captains and crew as they ply the unpredictable waters of Lake Michigan and her sister seas.

“Everybody thinks of the Great Lakes as these quiet, inland ponds,” said former Chicagoan Jim Campbell, an executive producer on the series. “The early French explorers called them the sweet seas. They discovered very quickly there’s nothing sweet about the Great Lakes. They’re treacherous.”

An estimated 6,000 ill-fated vessels rest at the bottom of the lakes’ collective 94,000 square miles. This freshwater ocean can be the perfect stage for drama, and tugboat workers are the ideal characters.

“We decided we wanted to do a show set in America’s heartland, in the Great Lakes, which nobody had ever tried before,” Campbell said. His interest first was piqued by the massive cargo-carrying lake freighters he saw during family vacations off the northern tip of Michigan, on Lake Huron’s Marquette Island.

He and his partners at Compass Point Productions soon shifted their focus from the relatively plush existence of lake freighters to the wilder, scrappier world of tugboats. While doing their research, they stumbled upon Selvick.

“We heard this guy is the gunslinger of the Great Lakes,” Campbell said. “He had this reputation as a rough-around-the-edges, hard-bitten captain who was willing to take the jobs other captains weren’t. We thought, ‘This is our guy,’ and he didn’t disappoint.”

Like all of the captains featured in “Great Lake Warriors,” Selvick comes from a long line of sailors. “I ran my first tug in Chicago when I was 7 years old,” he said. “I could just see over the wheel.”

In the Great Lakes, tugboats keep commerce moving along this key industrial waterway year-round, even when it means breaking through 3 feet of ice to forge a path for other ships. These diesel-powered workhorses tow and push cargo-laden barges many times their size.

Selvick started building his own tugboat business in 1994. His staff includes Capt. Ted Long, known as “Captain Nice” thanks to his penchant for chewing out deckhands. We learn in the first episode that Long’s bragging rights include being conceived on a tugboat.

The series also follows tug operators in Duluth, Minn., and a Canadian outfit based in Thunder Bay, Ont. That one employs cigarette-puffing Capt. Stan Dawson, who says stuff like, “The lake is not my mistress. It’s just some dirty b---- I gotta work around.” By the way, he also thinks Mother Nature is a “douchebag.”

The exploits of these veteran seamen and their greener counterparts play out against dramatic music, rough-weather footage and narration reminiscent of Discovery channel’s “Deadliest Catch.”

“Except they’re catching crabs and we’re moving barges and ships,” Selvick said. “Ours is a little more dangerous.”

Compass Point Productions initially spent 18 months filming aboard tugboats, including a long, cold trip from Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y., where they used hand-held cameras to document the action as they plowed through ice all the way across Lake Erie.

Armed with that footage and countless hours of research, Campbell enlisted the help of Chicago-based Towers Productions. Together they created a demo that got the green light from History, which has seen a lot of success in the blue-collar docu-series realm with hits like “Ice Road Truckers,” “Swamp People” and “Pawn Stars.”

“We’ve very familiar with the challenges of reality TV,” said “Great Lake Warriors” executive producer Jonathan Towers. “But doing it in the middle of winter on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior with tugboats was something completely new to us.”

Filmed from October to February, the eight-episode series was shot on Lake Michigan at Calumet Harbor, as well as Gary and Burns harbors in Indiana and Milwaukee and Sturgeon Bay, Wis.

The project posed plenty of logistical challenges, from rigging the boats with multiple cameras and keeping the production crew safe, to working around the fickle whims of both the shipping industry and the weather.

“Trying to get them film people to understand they can’t be jumping around and getting in the way — there was some close calls,” said Selvick, who sometimes wondered what he’d gotten himself into. “I wasn’t used to having film guys follow me around, 2 feet from my face. In the beginning, I kinda hated it. But I got used to it.”

It was around the time that Campbell first approached Selvick when the tugboat business took a dive. A bunch of steel mills closed down. Less product needed to be moved on the water.

“Overnight I went from going like gangbusters to doing almost nothing,” Selvick said. His fleet is down to 17 from the 21 tugs he owned in 2009. “It’s been a real struggle for the last three years.”

It’s a struggle that Towers said should resonate with a lot of people, whether they’re based on land or sea.

“Our series captures a true picture of some working-class heroes,” he said. “The dangers they face with nature are almost an expression of the risks they face just trying to run their businesses. The average American can relate to that. We don’t all face a November gale, but we all face that feeling that everything could fall apart.”

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Willy and I just watched the first show. Very good and if you were paying attention you should of seen the "Lauren Castle"....ppat