A deckhand's coming-of-age story of sailing the Great Lakes steamboats during the social and political turbulence of the early 1970s, "Lake Effect" is a vivid and memorable account, told in an entertaining narrative style, of life aboard the giant ore boats. In the early 1970s, Rich Hill sailed on four different US Steel freighters as a deckhand and deckwatch. Ten years later, he enrolled in the Great Lakes Maritime Academy as a deck cadet and sailed on the 1000-foot Columbia Star. This humorous yet poignant memoir follows his voyage of self-discovery.