Portage is looking into bringing passenger boats to its Lake Michigan lakefront.
Mayor Austin Bonta said Porter County's largest city is working to base passenger boats at the Port of Indiana-Burns Harbor, which now exclusively handles cargo from lake freighters, barges, trains, trucks and massive international ships known as salties. He said that passenger boats could offer the public tours of the Lake Michigan lakeshore in Northwest Indiana and that the city would look to lure Midwestern cruise ships to dock there.
He told a crowd of longshoreman at the deepwater port on Lake Michigan last week that Portage hoped to bring passenger vessels there.
"There's some interest with that in the city and that's something we're mindful of trying to attract here," he said. "When people are moving around the Great Lakes, this is a natural spot to stop when you think about it. Especially with the investments we're making on the north side of our city, both in terms of the industrial toward the east-north side and the residential and commercial on the more western north-side, this is going to become an even stronger Great Lakes destination."
Midwestern cruise ships have taken off in popularity in recent years, stopping at ports like Milwaukee and Muskegon, Michigan. Pearl Sea Cruises, St. Lawrence Cruise Lines and other cruise ship companies tour the Great Lakes while making stops at ports like Bay City, Michigan, Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Michigan, Duluth, Minnesota, Holland, Michigan, Houghton, Michigan and Mackinac Island, Michigan.
"I think that cruise ships could be coming down the road," he said. "It's something we're working on. There's interest. But you need to have a lot set up to be able to bring that type of thing."
Great Lakes cruise ships dock in places like Muskegon where they take visitors to museums like the SS Milwaukee Clipper, the USS Silversides Submarine Museum and the USS LST 393 Museum for day trips. Cruise ship visitors could be bused to Indiana Dunes National Park sites like the Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, Bonta said.
Portage also is interested in offering Lake Michigan boat tours the way Harbor Country Adventures does in Michigan City. People could see a mix of industrial and natural landscapes along the lakeshore, Bonta said.
"We're an area where we have industry, recreation and residents all mixed into one spot," he said. "We've got to think about how we invest and promote tourism along the dunes, both tourism and seeing the natural sites like the dunes and beaches, but also people being out and seeing what we have on the industrial side. I've taken people out on boat tours and we've gone up and down the coast here and it's cool when people see the beaches and the dunes. But what's also pretty breathtaking is when people see the port and the mills. They say 'wow' because they don't appreciate what it is (before they see it). When people are seeing things from the ground, they're only really seeing a limited view of it. They don't see how big our facilities are, how much we're working with on the lake."
Bonta believes there would be interest in boat tours of the Region's industry, to be able to see Northwest Indiana's hulking steel mills from a clearer vantage point out in Lake Michigan.
"I think it's something people would get very excited about as time goes by," he said. "For people to see all we have in Northwest Indiana, to see the mix of what we have here, I think there's already interest in the public in seeing all that."
Boat tours likely would come first. Cruise ships would be further out, Bonta said.
"We are definitely working on that and attracting interest to our city for that," he said. "If you're looking at a map geographically, it looks like a natural spot. There's also the National Park and things that we're adding."