037 - Put-In-Bay’s Real Name Is Party Central

It doesn’t fit the “Don’t Give Up the Ship” history or its dangerous anchorage but it is clearly the place where Ohioans go to cut loose. The town’s main street is one bar next to another. Flyers were advertising pub crawls, festivals, dancing, all the festivities you’d expect for a party happening place. At night it was “free” music for us on the water, I guess it was setting the beat for the revelry ashore. And the ferries shuttle hordes to and from the mainland all day long, even into the first hours of the night. For those with a boat it is an easy ride from Sandusky, a great weekend “get away.” We were there on a Thursday and you felt the preparations for the coming throng. They even limit the use of automobiles; tourist can’t rent or bring one. Golf carts are for the tourist to get around the island. It’s all set up to cut loose.

We took this picture atop the Perry monument. The bay is completely open to the east, although it is excellent protection from the prevailing westerly. The charts indicate the area in the foreground is for anchoring, the upper part of the bay is a mooring field. What the charts don’t tell you is the anchorage is flat rock at about a 15ft depth with 2 to 3 ft of sawdust on top. In a moderate breeze your anchor will drag through the sawdust and skip off the continuous surface rock. The saw dust came from saw mills that worked the island 100 to 150 years ago from lumber floated down the Detroit River. Guess I would have designated a different spot for an anchorage and maybe even put a warning sign suggesting the moorings. It highlights the risk of new waters; these things just aren’t documented for you to do your “homework.”

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046 - Fog Bank a Comin

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 ...

034 - USS Niagara

What a beautiful working replica of this historic ship. It is used today as a training ship and offers 10day expeditions for youth to learn the ways of sailing a Brigg. It is about as exact as you can expect. I loved their use manila rope, linseed oil, and other items that gives it the smell of an old ship – I don’t know what it is but it’s very familiar. Below decks were tight, it only had a 5ft ceiling in the galley area – how anyone could operate in that space long term was beyond me but the professional crew does. Galley stove and 5ft ceiling - how do they do it? Watching it sail was like stepping back it time. It passed us on the breakwater silently, tall, and majestic. It was easy to imagine the awe seeing this come into an isolated harbor like Presque Island 200 years ago. Something so big and complicated carrying so many men and cannon would change the balance of power with its arrival. It would intimidate the st...

033 - Presque Island Is A Beautiful Oddity

Most the shore of Lake Erie is a long straight beach. But jutting out is a very large peninsula that loops back on itself creating a bay. They say it’s formed by glaciers but this isn’t obvious to the casual observer. For starters, I don’t see how a glacier can flow if it doesn’t have a mountain to slide down and there is nothing to the North I’d call a mountain worthy of the lake depth gouge. Call me a geo skeptic, but some of the stories they tell sound more like conjecture than science. Behind the beach is a steep hill that drops to a valley and then a significant mountain behind it so it generally looks like it was formed by a really big dozier. So why this odd shaped bay jutting out into the lake? And the bay it creates is very deep and the channel small, what glacier movement did this? No matter how it was formed, the place is important to American history and is very beautiful and home to a great hot dog stand, “Sara’s.” Lake E...

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