Simply put, Denny Aho has a gift. Fortunately for countless friends and associates, he shares his gift generously.

While others who sail the Great Lakes might spend their downtime sleeping or reading or eating or writing or daydreaming or cell-phoning family and friends, Mr. Aho draws. He's never without his favorite set of pencils and a sketchpad. His pencil is always busy. And the results are stunning.

Hundreds of boats and bridges andshorelines and faces of mariners have flowed from his hand onto his paper. The images are crisp and realistic and somehow deeply gratifying. People just plain like looking at the art of Capt. Dennis Aho, a pilot of the Western Great Lakes Pilots Association and a man who, born on Columbus Day 1944, was just plain destined to be a mariner.

He was born in Superior, Wisconsin, and spent many of his growing-up days on a nearby farm. His paternal grandfather worked the ore docks. His father left lumberjacking to ship out on the Lakes in the 1930s. Several cousins worked the lakes. And all of his mother's brothers sailed — as had both her father and mother, as cook and second cook.

His family was Finnish-American, mostly, and to this day he can slip into the dialect known in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula as Finnglish and tell stories, for hours, that will simply crack you up.

At 18, Denny was on the Lakes, too, working as a deckhand on the Frank R. Denton. (Yes, he's proud of having achieved his current rank of captain as a hawsepiper, one of only five now in service in the Western Great Lakes Pilots Association.) Later came a letter on the JW Wescott, the only floating mail boat with its own ZIP code, in Detroit, Mich.

The letter was from Uncle Sam and included a warm invitation to join the United States armed forces. He has vivid recall of moments in Fort Leonard Wood and Fort Polk and Vietnam, where he spent some time in the bush with the in fantry and then, remarkably, or maybe not, as first mate on a Navy vessel while still serving with the Army. (It's a long story.)

He spent some time at college after his time at war, and then it was back on the Lakes. But all along, he never quit drawing. To this day, he packs his "art stuff" before he packs his clothes.

He draws everwhere he goes. He might surprise you at a meeting. You'll think he has been merely doodling until he presents you with a sketch of your likeness.

Ship's captains all over the world have received sketches of themselves and their vessels that Denny has given them as he departs. This caps a relationship of mutual respect. He enjoys giving his art as a gift. In return, he treasures the words, "I enjoyed your company, Mr. Pilot. You do a nice job of ship-handling."

He has studied watercolor and dabbles in that medium some. But he usually goes back to pencil. And boats and ships. "That's what I know," he said. "If it doesn't have rivets, I don't draw it."