Tension is rising in the flatlands of Cleveland as recreation and business interests compete for space on an improving Cuyahoga River.
The sun beamed down upon the muddy brown waters of the Cuyahoga River as the Holiday, a venerable tour boat, rounded a bend carrying downtown office workers on an autumn clambake.
The 65-foot craft honked a greeting to a passing sailboat as its wake splashed water into a pair of bright, slender shells -- dousing rowers fresh out of class at nearby St. Ignatius High School.
The rowers, the captains and the beer-sipping tourists -- along with three men fishing from shore -- all stole glances at the heavyweight on the scene. A 700-foot freighter was spilling its load onto one of the ore piles that rise like pebbly mountains along the hard-working river.
There was room enough -- just enough -- for everyone.
"It's what we call the messy vitality of the shipping channel," Jim White observed from the pilothouse of Flotsam, a debris-clearing workboat for the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority. "Now, how do we make sure it works for everyone?"
That's a question being asked more pointedly since last month, when a pair of Canadian-flagged freighters blocked the river during a well-publicized, multi-state regatta, drawing howls from the rowing community.
The U.S. Coast Guard judged the blockade an accident, the result of bad luck and a rookie captain. But there's more than a marred regatta churning the waters in the flatlands of Cleveland.
Since the demise of the Flats as a nightlife nexus a decade ago, tug boats, barges and freighters have had the crooked river largely to themselves as they ply a six-mile channel from Lake Erie to the steel works of ArcelorMittal.
Now, recreational users are re-emerging, leading a trend that's expected to accelerate as new parks, restaurants and marinas open up on both banks.
The rowers are the most obvious addition. What was once a scattering of sculls has become a fleet of hundreds as area high school, college and adult teams practice and compete on the winding river.
Meanwhile, more motor and sail boats are venturing upstream, where armored banks now give way in places to innovative fish playgrounds, some with landscaped shores and view piers, with traces of the Towpath Trail curving past.
"One of the goals was to provide more public access to the river," said White, who helped design the pocket habitats as director of sustainable infrastructure for the port.
Kayaks have joined the carnival, spilling out of an emerging Metropark next door to the huge boathouse of the Cleveland Rowing Foundation.
On the horizon is the $500 million Flats East Bank development, which is expected to bring nightlife, boaters and jet skiers back to the mouth of the river and maybe beckon more upstream.
The Cuyahoga, once renowned for catching fire, has benefited greatly from the environmental movement it ignited. A cleaner, greener river is becoming a place to be. And that's causing some friction among the people who work there and the people who play there.
"The tension, if it grew any more, it would explode," said Jane Goodman, executive director of the Cuyahoga River Community Planning Organization, an environmental advocacy group working to restore the river and its habitats.
Goodman thinks the river valley could be made even more accessible by giving the public access to roads and drawbridges domineered by heavy trucks.
"There are ways to share these resources, the bridges and the roads, just like there are ways to share the river," she said.
Jim Cox grows anxious to hear such talk. He represents the industrial players in the valley, from cement makers to salt miners, as director of the Flats Industry Association.
"This is an industrial river, and if recreation wants to share it, they have to understand the risks," Cox said. "It's not the Olentangy in Columbus. It's a federal navigation channel. And it's narrow. And it's winding"
And it's busy.
River protocol emerges
Wednesday afternoon presented a glimpse of what's routine and what's to come. Four lake freighters, each about the size of the Terminal Tower turned on its side, were unloading bulk cargo after threading the channel.
After school let out, rowing teams swarmed the docks of Rivergate Park. Soon, their artful shells flitted among the freighters and the pleasure boaters.
Despite the hectic scene, a practiced choreography was at work. Marine channel 16 crackled with communication between the motley crafts. Not long after a freighter radioed for a tug, Capt. Wayne Bratton announced the Holiday was disembarking "from beautiful Collision Bend" and the Shaker Heights High School crew team alerted river traffic to its location in a blind turn.
Protocols have emerged to guide the crew teams, which wait out passing freighters at safety zones and know to look out for bow thrusters that can flip a shell like a leaf. The rules of navigation apply to all crafts, and everyone knows the big ships have the right of way.
"Actually, I think it's working pretty well," said Lt. Commander Jerrel Russell. As commanding officer of the Coast Guard's Cleveland Marine Safety Unit, he's the nearest person to a referee on the river.
Most of the shipping channels in America's coastal cities are busy, Russell said. The Cuyahoga is narrower than most, closing to 113 feet at one point, but the people navigating the river regularly know what they're doing. It's newcomers he worries about.
"There's certainly safety and security issues we need to look for, but actually it's being shared pretty well right now," Russell said.
Alas, even the best-laid plans go awry.
How to ruin a regatta
Patrick Connor was at the river by 5 a.m. Sept. 21st to set up for the rowing community's big event, the annual Head of the Cuyahoga.
Connor, coach of the St. Ignatius crew team and the regatta chairman, knew that some 2,000 rowers were in town for the races. The Coast Guard had ordered the river closed to boat traffic. Bad weather had cleared.
The day's disaster emerged with the revealing light of dawn. A pair of lake freighters had slipped in the night before and inexplicably parked on opposite banks, parallel to one anther, virtually blocking the middle of the race course.
Anxious calls to the Coast Guard and to the tugboat docks revealed the worst. The freighters were moored, much of the crew was away, and the ships could not get moving anytime soon.
"That's when we knew we were in deep trouble," Connor said.
Some races had to be drastically shortened and many crew teams left disappointed.
After an informal inquiry, the Coast Guard determined a captain new to his role and delayed by weather had mistakenly moored in the wrong place, near the I-90 bridge instead of the I-490 bridge farther south.
He was not found to be in violation of any navigation laws or the decree that closed the river, Russell said, adding "Really, the stars just lined up wrong."
Connor agrees the blockade, while devastating, was not purposeful.
"About four or five things came together to cause this, but it highlighted the tension on the river," he said. "It also gives us an opportunity to address some of these issues."
Last year's regatta was marred as well, when another freighter arrived unexpectedly and bulled its way up river, delaying the race.
Connor wants the Coast Guard to close the river for a longer time span around the regatta and ask businesses to "voluntarily not schedule deliveries" during boat races.
That's a precedent that makes some uneasy.
Glen Nekvasil, whose Lake Carriers' Association represents U.S.-flagged vessels on the Great Lakes, has a competing idea. He wants a "transit window" that allows ships to pass through races on their appointed rounds.
He argues the freighters operate at a cost of $900 to $1,800 an hour, and have deliveries to make and schedules to keep.
"We realize the Great Lakes are a shared waterway. We're not trying to lord over everybody," Nekvasil said. "But we have a product to deliver. We're bringing iron ore that keeps the steel mill going."
Nekvasil, like Cox, is vexed by the idea of kayaks. Jet skis give him nightmares.
"The Cuyahoga River is a federal navigation channel," he declared.
With the new interests has emerged a new group, Flats Forward, which aims to design a collective vision for the river valley that's acceptable to all. Mark Lammon, the group's director, expects that to take awhile.
"It's probably the most diverse neighborhood in Cleveland, in terms of land use," Lammon said. "I think there's plenty of space down there for everyone. It's just a question of doing it safely and doing it fairly."
Meanwhile, the rowers, the park lovers, the shippers and the industrialists need a forum to air concerns, and they have one. Their representatives gather quarterly at meetings of the Coast Guard's Cuyahoga River Safety Task Force.
The next meeting, in November, figures to be animated. In fact, the agenda will likely be busy for months and years to come.
That's not all bad, Patrick Connor observed.
He was in college in the mid-1990s, when the Flats riverfront roared as one of the top tourist attractions in Ohio, and the Coast Guard posted restrictions on rowers for their safety. No shells were allowed past the Center Street swing bridge after 5 p.m. on Fridays.
"We liked that," Connor said. "If we have to put it back in place, that might be a sign that Cleveland has come back."