It's about time!!!

Welcome to My Blog! It's been a long time coming.....

This is the first time I have put my foot into the blogging waters, so be patient with me as I navigate this new vessel of communication with all of you! (Like how I added a couple of Great Lakes Shipping words in there? lol)

A big hello to all of you from all around the world who have been following my Facebook page, Dre Designs - Great Lakes Marine Products... It has been a labor of love the past 7 1/2 years and a few years ago I made the decision to finally get a website up to go along with that page. The hardest part has been really getting things off the ground, but I knew it needed to be done, so all of you could have a place to come to see all of the products I offer, but also to see some photos, and have links to my YouTube Channel, my Instagram and of course Facebook where things really took off for me. But maybe I should back up a bit so you actually know why I'm here to begin with....

For those of you who are new here, my name is Andrea Guerriero and I am a Real Estate Agent in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario but I also do Photography and Videography of our Great Lakes Ships and other vessels that transit these waters. I have been passionate about this industry since I was first introduced to it back in 2015 and as the years have gone by, my experiences have been vast and opportunities have been numerous. I have learned SO MUCH about Great Lakes shipping, about Photography, making videos and about myself as well. In fact I think I've become a better person because of this industry and all it has given me. My Following on Facebook has grown from a few thousand folks in my first few years to what is now almost 147,000 of you, the vast majority of that coming in the past few shipping seasons when we grew from 10,000 to where we are now. I have each and every one of you on Facebook to thank for that... Your allegiance to me and what I have done the past number of years has been a key part of why I have grown as much as I have so THANK YOU!!

For this first Blog, I'm going to basically give you my background, how I got started in all of this and what I'm all about. I wrote an article for UP Magazine in September of 2023 and so I'm using that because we have had so many new Followers since it was Published. I hope you enjoy it and I hope reading it will help make you feel like you know me a little bit better! So here we go.....

I never know how exactly to start a piece I’m writing.  It’s a struggle to figure out those first words that will grab the attention of the reader in a way that will make them want to continue reading to see what I have to say.  Compounded by the fact that this is my first blog and I'm writing about myself and my story of success doing what I’m doing, and it suddenly has become an even more daunting task.

Are you interested yet? I hope so.

I guess the best thing to do, would be to start from the beginning, so here goes…

As I mentioned at the very beginning of this piece, my name is Andrea Guerriero and I am a Canadian Realtor/Photographer living in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.  I am a Realtor by trade and a Photographer of Great Lakes ships and other vessels whenever I can fit it in, with photography being something that really just came into my life over the past 10 years.  I was born and raised here in “the Sault”, living along the St Mary’s River in a house my parents bought in 1967.  It was a scary looking place at that time.  Everyone in town referred to it as the “Ghost house” and thought my parents were nuts when they decided to buy it. It was built in the early 1930’s and a ferry boat Captain actually lived in it.  It sits high on a hill of sorts, directly facing the ferry dock in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan.  It’s the only house here that does that.  All the rest just face the river out in front of us. My Dad initially agreed to go look at it thinking they would walk through it and my Mom would realize there was just no way and they would move on and look at other places.  He humoured her but little did he know her brain was coming up with ideas even during that first walk through.  They finished and he said to her “So? What do you think?” assuming she would say it was way too much work and let’s go.  Instead, to my Dad’s utter shock and disbelief she said “I love it!” She explained the potential to him and convinced him to go back with her so she could show him.  They went back and her reasoning convinced him. And of course if it was something she wanted, he went along with it, even if he had his concerns. 

Not exactly the nicest house in town... This is what my house looked like when my parents initially looked at it in 1967

The work on it began immediately.  It needed everything you could possibly imagine. They worked and worked and worked and in the 50+ years since, have turned it into what we all feel is one of the coolest houses in the entire city, and it’s certainly on the best piece of property you could ask for.  Our views from here are fabulous, no matter which way you look.  I of course, am partial to the view of the ferry dock in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan that the ferry boat Captain would have enjoyed when he lived here back in the day and that’s the view all of you enjoy when I shoot my videos of the ships from home either arriving in or leaving Sault Ste Marie.  I remember my parents saying there were even windows throughout the house shaped like portholes.  One of them still exists in our laundry room.

Here is our house after a lot of initial work but still so much to do. My parents would add three additions, a wraparound deck, gazebo, tiered garden and so much more in the close to 60 years they have lived here

2019 seen from one of the Soo Lock Tours boats when they used to do the dinner cruises

October of 2024. We have a lot of trees so it makes for some beautiful colour at that time of year

Are you still interested? All I’ve done so far is talk about the house I grew up in….

I lived here with my folks until 1990 when I moved away to go to university.  I was gone a few years, then moved back home and actually obtained my degree across the river in Sault Ste Marie, Michigan at Lake Superior State University. That summer I moved away again and this time it was for a long while. Twenty years I was gone, spending 13 of those years in Toronto, Ontario and the last seven in a city an hour south west called Kitchener, Ontario. I had my degree from LSSU and a few years of the Interior Design program from what was then called Ryerson Polytechnic University in downtown Toronto, and I was working with my own Interior Design business and I had a part time job in a Benjamin Moore paint store as well.

Life was moving along in Southern Ontario but in 2015 the decision was made for me to move back home up north to Sault Ste Marie.  I had been gone 20 years by then but I wasn’t having the success I wanted and I was frustrated.  In addition my parents both turned 80 that year and it was apparent that if they were going to stay in this house, they would need some help. I knew I could bring my Interior Design business home with me and give it a go here.  Perhaps I would be more successful in a smaller place than Kitchener and Toronto. And most importantly I would be there to help my parents.  We have a large home on a large piece of property so I could easily move back in with them and save a lot of money and help them at the same time. Almost ten years later, our lives have all changed dramatically but me being here has been important from their perspective and mine, and I am so glad I made the decision to come home.

My Dad, Larry and Mom, Marilyn. I believe this was taken in 2015 the year I moved back home. They would have been 80 then. Both are 90 now.

Now let’s talk about the ships and my start with those! 

It was a mere three weeks after I returned home that we did a road trip that would change my life.  We didn’t know what an effect that trip would have on me until much later but it was certainly a turning point in my life that I am so very thankful for to this day.

My brother who lives in Toronto, Ontario has a love of motorcycles and he owns a few.  He had ordered a one piece riding suit from a company in Duluth, Minnesota and he needed to go there to have them do a final fitting to ensure it was right.  He asked us if we wanted to drive over there and meet him (He would of course come from Toronto on his motorcycle) We agreed to go and off we went. I loved Duluth from the moment we got there.  I had never been before and I just loved everything about the entire area.  It’s a beautiful place to just drive around and explore and there’s so much to do. We saw art galleries and museums and the fabulous Glensheen Mansion was to die for, especially for me with my Interior Design background. And the garden outside was just incredible! It was something else though that started everything for me with the ships.

My Mother suggested that we take a Harbor Cruise so we hopped on board one of the Vista Star boats and headed out one evening.  As luck would have it, the Paul R Tregurtha was in town and was leaving the Harbor.  We had gone out under the aerial lift bridge and were sitting out on Lake Superior when the PRT made the turn to come under the bridge.  We needed to wait for her before we could go back into the Harbor so we enjoyed a lesson from the Narrator of the boat, telling us all about the ship. The PRT of course blasted a salute for the fans watching along the canal, to which the bridge responded and we got close enough to her that I got a bunch of photos, one of which turned out to be my very first shot of a ship ever posted on social media.  I was amazed at her size. Growing up in Sault Ste Marie, I had seen the ships from our house but I think like many, you tend to take something for granted when it’s around you all the time and I hadn’t had the pleasure of riding up next to one at any point before this.  That’s my biggest regret.  I wish so much that I had paid more attention to the ships when I was young and grew up with an interest in them.  I was born in 1971 so I have lived through a time when there were some gorgeous vessels and I look back now and it’s sad to think of how much I missed.  Even the Edmund Fitzgerald went past our house many times between the time I was born and when she went down 4 years later. 

My first social media post was this shot of the Paul R Tregurtha as she headed out onto Lake Superior leaving Duluth in August of 2015.

Just a few days after returning home to Sault Ste Marie, we were on our International Bridge crossing over to Michigan to head to Petoskey when lo and behold, underneath us was the Paul R Tregurtha again heading upbound back to Superior, WI to load more coal.  I didn’t know that of course at the time.  We just saw her and realized that was the ship we saw on the Harbor tour in Duluth just days before, so we got through customs and zipped over to West Pier to watch her go by.  That was August of 2015.  “Captain Bob” (Captain Robert Thibaudeau) had just taken over as the permanent Captain for the newly retired Captain Timothy Dayton.  He wasn’t aboard at the time, but 2015 was when he had started on the PRT as her permanent Captain. Again facts I didn’t know at the time, and only found out years later. We watched as she glided past us silently, and once again I was amazed.  From that point onward I followed nothing but the PRT for an entire year.  We used the Boatnerd AIS tracking from their website www.boatnerd.com and we followed her whereabouts as much as we could. Any time she was in the area, I was out photographing her. I just had a Canon point and shoot at the time, but it served its purpose. My Mom was a frequent passenger in the car when I would go out to grab some photos and she in fact was the person who insisted we start going when they were in town, and that was what really got me into taking all the photos I do now.

Are you still with me? I hope so.  If you’ve read this far you might as well keep going until the end right?

Well for the next year all I did was take various pictures of the Paul R Tregurtha. I became somewhat obsessed.  It was such a great diversion from trying to build a design business here and I had actually also started the courses to obtain my Real Estate License so I was right into all of that coursework and studying as well.  The entire idea of ships on the Great Lakes was something that while I saw them my whole life, I knew nothing about.  That was all about to change in a hurry……

After amassing a rather large collection of photos of the PRT, I decided to make a calendar of her and I wanted to send copies to the ship. Back then I was just sharing my photos on the very popular Facebook page, “Fans of Know Your Ships” (now called “Fans of the book Know Your Ships”). I did a post asking how to go about sending a package to a vessel and who the current Captain was and I got a lot of replies that gave me the answers I needed. Off I went getting a dozen calendars made, and I wrote a letter to Captain Thibaudeau that I included inside along with my business card. I went across the river to the Post Office and sent the package (not realizing I could have just driven down the road to Soo Marine Supply to drop it off) and after receiving it I got an email from Captain thanking me and saying how great the calendars were and he would certainly pass them out to the crew.  He ended by saying “Stay in touch” and that I did. From that day forward a friendship was formed with Captain Bob that remains to this day even beyond sailing.  He has retired from Great Lakes Shipping and is enjoying life with his family now but we still stay in touch.

I think that friendship sparked something in me because the next year I started paying more attention to other ships as they came and went from Sault Ste Marie. I started taking more and more photos and I started doing some videos as well. Back then I didn’t have my own Great Lakes Shipping page on Facebook, I was just posting as a member of various shipping groups. What I found out through the Admins of one of those groups, was that as people comment on your post it gets bumped back up to the top of the page and apparently my posts were always getting comments so even if I had originally shared it a week before it kept getting bumped to the top of the page and it was starting to look like I was the only person contributing because you would scroll down the page and all you would see were my posts for a long time.  I was asked to cut back my posting to once or maybe twice per day.  Well I wasn’t going to do that so I started trying to think of what else I could do, and then Keith Baker, a Wheelsman from the Cason J Callaway, suggested I start up my own page and he mentioned to not make it a “Group” where anyone can post, but make it a “Business Page” instead so I could control the content.  Keith has his own page and many of you might know it if you follow Great Lakes Shipping on Facebook at all. It’s called “STORM WARRIOR Great Lakes Sailor/Keith Baker” So it was his suggestion and his pushing that got me to start up my own page.  When I had it ready to go, he promoted it on his page and that got me off and running very quickly. August 24, 2017 is the official date my page first went live on Facebook and it has been a total whirlwind ever since then.

One of my favorite PRT shots taken at Pointe Louise in May of 2018. She had just started her season after having her stacks re-configured into one with a scrubber system in them to improve their emissions

A lot has changed in the last six years.  I started my Facebook page www.facebook.com/DreDesignsGLMP with the only intention being to post my own videos and photos and hopefully gain an audience of folks who would enjoy seeing them. Over time it has morphed into something I could never have imagined, designing and selling products, including most recently ones with my logo on them, getting opportunities to tour vessels, back in 2019 I was asked to go aboard the American Spirit for a week with other Photographers and to this day that was the most incredible experience of my life. I did a short day and a half trip in 2022 aboard the Herbert C Jackson which was special because she was the very first ship I ever set foot on back in 2018 down in Port Dolomite. 

I've toured Coast Guard ships here in port in Sault Ste Marie, I’ve toured the State of Michigan training vessel, I’ve travelled extensively to shoot the ships in varying locations (I don’t take “normal” vacations anymore.  Instead all of my free time is devoted to road trips to see ships!) I’ve become an Associate Member of the International Shipmaster’s Association, I sit as the Secretary for the Soo Locks Visitor Center Association Board of Directors, and I sit on the Sault Historic Sites Board of Directors. I have met SO MANY people in the Great Lakes Shipping industry and I have formed friendships with MANY mariners who sail.  They are the most important people in all of this and I hold them all in such high regard and have so much respect for what they do and how they do it.  When you research and learn what it takes to be a mariner and what it takes to run a shipping company, you begin to understand the importance of good people in all of it.  Without them, this industry would be nothing which then means we would be nothing because they provide us with the everyday commodities that we need to survive and be successful in our own right. I’ve been fortunate to Interview many of these mariners and hope to continue to do that, so I can bring everyone fun and interesting information about them and the ships they sail on. This season that may come by way of Podcast! It's the start of yet another addition to what I already do and I'm really looking forward to it. I have also been fortunate enough to do some speaking engagements for the Saginaw Marine Historical Society, be featured in North Star Port magazine and I also have a photo in the newest Great Lakes shipping book published called “Seaway Queens” (www.seawayqueens.com if you're interested in purchasing a copy) I’ve been interviewed on podcasts and on the radio and for television.  It’s been crazy how things have grown and taken off, turning into something I could never have imagined. The page that I started to just showcase my own work without limitations, has turned into something far beyond my wildest expectations with well over 140,000 Followers now joining us from all over the world.  It is exciting to know that we can bring Great Lakes Shipping to parts of the world that knew nothing about it, and have people be as excited about it as we are. It’s why I do what I do.  I am passionate about this industry, what it does for us and how everything works.  I love to learn and I hope that I can continue to do so and bring people interesting educational and informative things that allow everyone to become as passionate about this as I am.

My photo of the Alpena that was used in the "Seaway Queens" hardcover book! Go to www.seawayqueens.com to order a copy for yourself or someone you know!

I have also THOROUGHLY enjoyed meeting and getting to know other Photographers in this industry.  Eight years in and I am still so green in comparison to so many wonderful Photogs from across the Lakes who have been doing this for decades. With the vast majority of them there is no ego, only support and encouragement. And we not only support each other, we promote each other as well, and I have truly made friendships from all over because of that common bond of being so passionate about these vessels and their crews. There are so many Photographers out there who inspire me and push me to learn more and become better at this craft and I hope there will always be someone out there who challenges me to learn and be better.  What we do is so important because we are not only capturing a moment in time, we are also marking the history of this industry with every click of the camera.  I love that realization and I love that it makes me feel so proud of what I try to do everyday, and that’s to make sure that each and every one of you can come along on this journey with me, experience what I do and ultimately feel that passion that makes you feel the way I do too…..

Me in October 2022 doing what I love. Capturing the fabulous ships of the Great Lakes!

I should add one new thing that has happened since I originally wrote this piece... Two seasons ago I was given a sidekick who now joins me all over the place when I'm shooting or doing events! His name is Boatwinkle and he's an adorable stuffed Moose that was sent to me by one of my Followers! Their instructions were to name him and have him do lots of adventures I could share with everyone... You see, this family sends them to various ships in the hope that they will have fun and name theirs and get pics as if it were "Elf on a Shelf" but it's more like "Moose on the Loose" They decided I needed one too and after posing the question on my page as to what he should be named, he became Boatwinkle and has been on MANY adventures ever since, including going out on a bunch of ships I've never been on!! He seems to be loved by everyone who sees him and there are already plans in place for him to have a big year this shipping season!!

My life is forever changed because of Great Lakes Shipping and I can’t picture myself without the ships, their crews, Boatwinkle of course, and all of my Followers right here with me. With the new 2025-2026 Shipping season upon us, I feel nothing but excitement and happiness because I know it's going to be chalked full of wonderful experiences and memories that will last me a lifetime.

If you’re still here then congratulations you made it to the end! I hope this has told you all about where I came from and how I have come to love this industry and everyone in it! If you ever see a white Toyota 4Runner with Canadian plates driving around Sault Ste Marie, or anywhere else for that matter, don’t be afraid to wave or say hi… It just might be me lugging my gear around trying to find the next best thing to share with you all.  Thanks for sticking with me and giving me a reason to continue doing this everyday… Make sure to leave a comment, or explore the rest of my website, maybe check out the Shop or send me a message!

Until next time......

“BYE FOR NOW”

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