Every night, the sun sets a little differently on Lake Erie. Which is why Aprell Burkey, the head server at Sunset Harbor Bar & Grille in Fairport Harbor, takes photos of the sunset nearly every night. “I have like a bajillion of them,” said Burkey, an amateur photographer beginning to turn her hobby into a…

LAKESIDE, Ohio – It must be the triathlon code, that when you pass someone, you call out encouragement. As I climbed out of the rolling swells of Lake Erie Friday morning, a whole crowd on the dock cheered and clapped. And biking on a two-lane highway hugging the Ohio coast, I heard: “This is one…

Cleveland might be the biggest city on Lake Erie, but it ranks behind Port Clinton and Toledo in the number of Lake Erie-destined boats registered in its corporate limits. Port Clinton has 2,234 boats, roughly one for every two residents. Cleveland has 1,977, which means .005 percent of the population owns a boat. Across Cuyahoga…

Sailboats make up 2 percent of the boats registered on Lake Erie. Or at least 2 percent of all registered boats say the propulsion type is sail. Perhaps some of them are registered as propeller, since they have an engine to putter out of the marina and back again? RocktheLake analyzed Ohio Department of Natural…

The longest boat registered on Lake Erie is 87 feet. The average of the nearly 59,000 boats, though, is 19 feet 3 inches – pretty small to handle Lake Erie’s notorious chop. Then again, that includes kayaks. RocktheLake analyzed Ohio Department of Natural Resources data with cleveland.com’s data analysis expert Rich Exner. Here’s what he…