A few years ago, I found a site that tracks the ships on the Great Lakes (and elsewhere).

When I combined it with the Great Lakes live cams, I found I was able to track and actually see ships coming and going into particular ports on the Great Lakes.

As there are sites for this kind of stuff, I guess I am not the only one who finds ship watching fascinating.

On our recent Summer vacation in Michigan, I was hoping to be able to witness the arrival of a ship in Manistee. Sadly, there were none while I was there.

Anyway, here are a couple of the sites I watch.

This one for locating ships.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/.../centery:43.3/zoom:7


And this one for the live cams:
http://www.lakerart.com/links.htm

There is even a FB page for the Great Lakes Ship Watchers.

Are there any other ship watchers here?

Don't do it myself since I live inland from Puget Sound, but some of our best bino customers are harbor and boat traffic watchers. Occasionally we'll even sell a spotting scope to some hardcore sound watcher, all in the hopes of catching a pod of orcas, watching sailboat races or the ferry boats from his or her living room. Last Swarovski spotting setup I sold was to just such a person.

Thank you for those links, Steve! While I don’t know if I’ll be able to access them reliably on the coast of Superior, they’ll certainly come in handy on the beach in Lexington! The cams are awesome!

Watch various Navy ships come/go

https://www.youtube.com/c/SanDiegoWebCam/videos

P-220,

that is so cool thanks for the link... the really interesting thing is there are actually small recreation ships that it seems have transmitters to this site too.

Live near the Mississippi River and spend time up on the Tennessee river and use the app FindShip to locate and get the name of tow boats on the river

Marinetraffic is what I use. The other night I rode my motorcycle down to the lake and the upper harbor ore dock. Sat and watched two lake boats maneuver around the harbor on a gorgeous summer night. If you are a boat watcher, our upper harbor can get you the closest access there is to the ore boats on Superior. Watching one dock never ceases to amaze me.

I use Marinetraffic.

Thread drift but the book and movie Shipping News might be worth a look.

Marinetraffic also has an app with some useful features. It has augmented reality as well which some ship watchers might find fun.