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Photo by Butch Schulte

No, this isn’t a ghost ship. It’s the research vessel, the 77.5- foot Arcticus, caught in the Grand Marais harbor fog. The research vessel is operated by the Great Lakes Science Center, an arm of the U.S. Geological Survey. The steel-hulled ship is designed to conduct lake-wide bottom trawl surveys, acoustic surveys, and gill net surveys. More than half of the research work is done at night, with crews working from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., when much of the Lake Superior and the other great lakes ecosystem is most active. The Arcticus home base is Cheboygan, Michigan, and it goes out for up to 30 days at a time.