Our Voyage

It’s complicated but it really lets you pack them in.  Having done it now 3 times now, I hope I’m done with it.  For us it’s complicated by the tender hanging off the stern and our stern anchor rode being 300 ft long in the bottom of a lazarette under a pile of other items.  All the rode has to come out into the cockpit for attaching to a tree on the shore.   It makes for a messy operation.  Let’s see if I can explain. To anchor med style, you have to be able to backup well, which being a sailboat puts us at a distinct disadvantage (can you hear me saying powerboat would be better here too, but I won’t say it).  You also ignore the winds as you will back into a parking spot between other boats anchoring the same way.  You “simply” pick a spot, throw out the bow anchor in front of it, back into the slot and tie a rope to something substantial on the shore, and put out bumpers for your neighbors.  That’s all you have to do.  So we pick...

The burdened vessel in all these waterways are the big boys; ocean going freighters are almost as common as “lakers”.  Lakers are the same sized freighter with the bridge on the bow to look around corners better, not a place for a bridge that heads into the oceans.  But to the point, I don’t know how they do navigate these waters at all, especially with the precsion required to avoid ostructions.  Between the wind, current, turns and night operations it seems no one could navigate these waters safely but here they are 24/7 (expect winter).  What could they possibly do to avoid hitting any of us?  Nothing.  Their timing must be impecible and my being in there way is not part of the equation.  It’s like a mouse dancing with elephants.  I wouldn’t recommend doing a cha-cha unless you have lots of power (I’m not going to say it again, but powerboats have far better odds here the sailboats).   Being spitting distance to these big boys is i...

I admit the picture doesn’t show much, but this was 5.5kts underneath Peace Bridge near Port Huron.  We were doing 1/2kt against the current.  People on the shore were walking faster than us.  It was impressive.  I’m glad to be on Lake Huron where there are no currents.  The lake does slosh around with wind but I can handle that, I really don’t want to fight 5.5kts of current again, it was taking the boat and tossing it all around like a cork.  I was working the tiller harder than in a following sea.  You can see a bit of an eddy in the lower right but you’ll have to trust me on this one.  The dramatized blurry picture below shows the turbulence and terror of the experience.  It also captures the Loch Huron monster in the middle left – it’s unexplained what that silver hump is.  Yikes!

The Great Lakes are mislabeled, they are really inland seas.  They are so big that one end can have very different weather than the other end or even the middle.  Waves however don’t really care where they come from and can travel hundreds of miles, reflecting off hard coastlines.  Shallow waters amplify the waves by making for a shorter period; this can create little waves that brings the boat to a complete stop as it goes up and down pounding against a wall of water.  Similarly, one end of the lake may be experiencing 20+kts of wind and the other end could be in a dead calm with waves that originated from the other end.  Makes it tough to know what the conditions are for your journey, so when its good take advantage of it, it will likely change.

We’re in a different place!  The waters of Lake Huron are a Caribbean turquoise, so much so that had you told me I was there I would have believed you.

To all those who insist on paper charts as a backup to electronics, “what good are they in fog?”  What was a surprise to us was the frequency of fog on the lakes, it wasn’t anticipated by us, seemed like a New England issue not a lake issue.  But the water is cold (60s in the big water) and the air is warm which is perfect for dense fog.  We learned at the shipwreck museum that a large percentage of ship wrecks on the Great Lakes are ships driving into other ships, mostly in dense fog.  Radar, GPS, electronics charts and AIS should mostly preclude this cause of shipwrecks.  We expected the number one cause for shipwrecks to be bad weather (think Edmond Fitgerald) but bad weather only accounted for ¼ of so of great lakes shipwrecks.  With far better forecasting today, this too shouldn’t be an issue like it used to be.  But back to our story, without radar, we played our fog horn, set a watch on the bow, watched the AIS for ships (we could see them ...