Whitefish Point at the Upper Peninsula’s northeastern tip is a notoriously challenging area for ship captains navigating Lake Superior.
It’s where they decide whether conditions are a “go” or “no go” for safe entrance into the open lake, said Hayden Henderson, a senior research engineer at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center.
That’s why Michigan Tech placed a buoy there to track wave height, a metric that captains and weather forecasters use to determine whether to cross the inland sea. Henderson consulted with the Lake Carriers Association, the trade group representing American Great Lakes commercial shipping companies, to decide where the buoy should go…