2001 - To St. Lawrence River & Back
Ocean Explorer News - Monday, May 21, 2001 - 5:30 PM EDST
Latitude 45 19.0 Longitude 85 15.5 - Charlevoix, Michigan
We are currently tied up at the municipal marina in Round Lake in Charlevoix, Michigan. One gets to Round Lake via a channel from Lake Michigan. One can go a bit further into Lake Charlevoix, which is a huge inland lake with two arms, each of which is about 15 miles long.
A strong low-pressure area is moving through and it is currently raining. Our next leg is through Gray's Reef Passage and then down the Straits of Mackinac (and under the bridge). The prediction was for 30 knots of wind out of the east, which would have been right on the nose for the 30 miles or so going through the Straits. That would have been a real thrash, so we decided to take a lay day. The wind forecast for tomorrow is much more favorable.
We had a good day of sailing from Leland to here yesterday. Wind, at one time or another, was from zero to 15 knots and from every direction known to man. None-the-less, we were able to sail all but fifteen minutes of the trip. Patience ran out at one point and the engine was started, but fifteen minutes later the wind appeared.
This is an interesting part of the country. Many of these small towns on the Michigan shore had their beginnings in the lumbering and fishing industries. The rebuilding after the Chicago Fire brought a lot of prosperity from lumber sales to this side of the lake. Now these towns are tourist destinations for folks from Chicago and Detroit (mostly Detroit). Seasonal homes in this area often exceed the size of any year-round homes one sees in our home town.
Cynosure, a 70 foot racing machine, pulled in here for a couple of hours today. She is on her way from Harbor Springs, MI to Sheboygan, WI. We know the boat because it is usually stored in Manitowoc during the winter. She had the misfortune to pile into Spectacle Reef doing 12 knots in the middle of the night during last year's Port Huron to Mackinac Race. She nearly broke in half. In spite of this, the crew was able to get her into a port, and she was repaired over the winter. Donna and I were invited aboard to see the repair work. It is impossible to see any evidence of the damage.
Fair winds and calm seas,
Donna and Rich
Ocean Explorer News - Thursday, May 24, 2001 - 2 PM EDST
Lat N 45 25.4, Lon W 083 48.7 - Rogers City, Michigan
On Tuesday, May 22 we had a great sail from Charlevoix, MI to Cheboygan, MI (Lat N 45 39.3, Lon W 084 28.0). We had a broad reach with good winds north to Gray's Reef and then east through the Straits of Mackinac and on to Cheboygan. But, I won't belabor that. In summary it was a fine (but cool) day.
Yesterday we experienced our first major misadventure. We left Cheboygan under sail, raising our sails literally in the wind shadow of the huge, red, Coast Guard Icebreaker Mackinaw, which is permanently stationed there. We then had a beat to the east before making a slight, further turn over the top of the lower peninsula of Michigan and heading SSE. As we did so, we experienced increasing winds and, eventually, four-foot seas. Making slow progress we elected to head for Rogers City, but with some reservations. Those who read last year's saga may recall that RC's entry has only 8 feet of water. When your boat draws 6 feet, as does ours, and you have 4-foot waves running, there is a reasonable chance that you will kiss the bottom (stone in this case) on the way in.
Two and a half miles out of Rogers City, while under power and generating lots of spray while heading into the waves, I saw a very small fish net buoy suddenly appear about 40 feet to port. Within a split second I heard our engine start straining. Then it quit altogether. Somehow we had entangled part of the net in our prop and we were held fast. The bow of the boat naturally turned downwind since, in effect, we were anchored. Fortunately, the design of our boat provides a lot of buoyancy astern. It rode up the waves with only a little splash coming into the cockpit. Some designs could have taken significant water aboard and been in serious trouble. Well, except for being cold (48 degrees at the time) and pitching a great deal in the waves, we were not in any danger, but what to do? The water temp was 42 degrees and you can bet I wasn't going overboard to try to free us. To make a long story short, I called the marina on the radio and they contacted a salvage company in Rogers City. The owner/diver came out in his boat with two others (one of them quite seasick by the time they got there), and he dove and freed us. They then towed us (the line was still entangled in the prop - too dangerous to try to remove it in those wave conditions) into the marina. We did make it over the shallow area without hitting bottom. There was a group of about a dozen people on the dock to help get us under control as we came in (we had rudder control, but no way to slow ourselves down as we drifted in the high wind. The only damage we sustained was to knock off one of our running lights on a steel piling. That was promptly retrieved out of the water with a net and then taken home for repair by one of the men (it has been reinstalled and is working fine). The diver went back into the water and removed the rest of what proved to be about 20 feet of 3/8-inch polypropylene line.
The diver charged us $500 for the entire thing - dives, tow, boat, and manpower. His original bill was $800, but he said our boating experience made his job easy - a compliment, I think. Some folks are out here with very little boating savvy. Some of the stories you hear will make your hair curl - like the one where the guy was using a restaurant placemat as his chart.
Well, this has turned into a rather big deal. This is the first year that Native Americans have been allowed to net along this coast. It appears to be a hot-button issue with concerns about adequate marking of nets, competition with sport fishermen, etc. The harbormaster has contacted the Indian Law Enforcement Agency in Sault St. Marie and a DNR officer visited us as I was writing this. A little while later a second DNR officer showed up. For us, we accept this as one of the risks of boating on the Great Lakes. Nets are not uncommon - we make every attempt to avoid them and, prior to this, we had always been lucky and had avoided becoming entangled. We are glad that it was not a situation of more serious consequences.
Fair winds,
Donna & Rich
