Originally posted by tim60 Inland water bodies are notorious for bad storms.
Do the storms on Lake Superior come up almost without warning or are they the result of the general weather in the area and so fairly predictable the day before?
There are literally thousands of weather related commercial shipwrecks on Lake Superior over the last 250 years. Weather forecasting has improved greatly over even the past 20 years. Bad weather forecasts today of potential storms are typically made upward of several days in advance. However, locations on the Lake for these storms is still very general at best. I am talking about storms meaningful for large freighters which range from 230-300m (750-1000 ft) in length. For smaller watercraft, things can still get nasty with little notice.
Some people do refer to Superior as an inland sea. But salt-water mariners will quickly notice that fresh water is less buoyant than salt water, and it freezes faster when coating a craft in cold weather. They will notice that wave frequency is higher. Still, Lake Superior is large enough to experience tide. Admittedly we are talking about typically an inch or less, but the tide is measurable. I have watched streams draining into the Lake slow, stall, or even reverse flow due to tide.