038 - Avoiding Customs

The waterway from Lake Erie to Lake Huron is a bit confusing. The Detroit River is more like a fast-moving delta region with “the river” breaking up into 3 channels at one point with multiple islands. The USA/Canadian border winds its way around these waters and it is very difficult to keep track of what country you are in at any one time. Lake St. Clair is straight forward enough, but the St. Clair River which is the outflow from Huron to St. Clair is similar the Detroit River, more a flooded delta region that makes it difficult again to know what country you are in.

The basic rule is you can transit each other’s waters as long as you don’t anchor, transfer people or cargo to another boat, or touch each other’s shore or facilities. If any of the three occur you must report to customs within 24 hrs. The Canadian’s make this relatively easy with a phone call, the American’s not so much, they require a face-to-face in one of their “conveniently” located offices. I’m not sure who its convenient for but we didn’t find any near where we touched. Prior to 9-11 these rules were not enforced and you simply did what you needed to do to transient these waters. Particularly when it came to anchoring. No one cared whose territory it was as long as you didn’t get off. Not now, they have patrols looking for infractions. Sadly, the best and only anchorages on the Detroit River were in Canada. The one in the picture was the only US anchorage and as you can see it was small. The picture doesn’t capture the other two boats behind the big boy or the other that came in later. It was super crowded, one of the worse we experienced on the Great Lakes. All law has unintended consequences, this is just a minor one but living evidence how it impacts lives.

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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 ...

048 - Big Water

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.

051 - Med Style Anchoring – It’s so European

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...

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