Leaving Las...Frankfort

Monday, June 7

34.6.miles

We left Frankfort about 1030 am after walking down to the beach and seeing that it had calmed down enough for us...erm...the Captain to think it was safe. Tim and his crew followed us out and they quickly passed us. They headed to Northport, but we set a course for South Manitou Island.

We quickly passed Betsie Point and the lighthouse there. And then we spent a while sailing towards... yes, I said sailing, not motoring...towards Sleeping Bear Dunes.  We were moving along at 6.2 knots on just the Genny again.  Chuck estimates the wind was ~20 mph most of the days with a few gusts.



And then just like that, Sleeping Bear disappeared into the haze. We’d been watching for a tug and a barge that we could see on the radar and identify by its AIS signal, but we were 2 miles out from it and still not able to see it, until finally it came out of the haze a little bit...just enough to see it with the binoculars. Thank goodness Chuck installed the radar before this trip.


At around 3 o’clock on our approach to South Manitou Island, we suddenly lost our depth transducer. This created a bit of excitement,as you can imagine. Approaching an island that has a reef without a depth finder is really not a good idea. Chuck had actually been fiddling all morning with setting up a new sonar so that we could look for some shipwrecks, but that suddenly became urgent. That man is amazing. In just a few minutes he had us hooked up with a new display on the GPS.   (Of course, that made the depth finder on the sailboat started working again.) Now,we think that we might have a limit on how deep can see. It would’ve been nice to know that before we panicked... Well, before I panicked....Chuck never seems to panic. Neither does Feather.







Now are anchored out in the bay at South Manitou Island. Chuck wanted to go and see a Greek freighter that’s wrecked on the south side of the island but the weather wasn’t agreeing with that plan. We were also half a mile from the lighthouse here but unable to see it in the fog.



 It looked to be too far to get to Charlevoix tonight, and Northport would add two hours of travel time that we don’t really have, so we’ve decided to anchor out at South Manitou Island. One lone sailboat joined us after we anchored a few hundred yards across the bay. They probably didn’t plan to stay here either but this is what the weather has decided.


So I turned this:  into this:

 With warm chocolate chip cookies from the Omnia Oven for dessert.

  Chuck talked me through the plans for tomorrow. Then we watched two harlequin ducks (my first ever) walk the lonely beach, and then watched the sunset.









Comments

  1. SharonJune 8, 2021 at 6:55 AM

    What is more fun than island hopping?! It looked like a beautiful time to visit S. Manitou.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownJune 8, 2021 at 2:11 PM

    The lighthouse is pretty cool when open to tour from inside. The Greek freighter is only mildly interesting - it will be gone in a few years more of ice and waves. Sonar - yeah, they have max depths depending upon strength of signal and "murkiness" of the water, i.e. give it lots to scatter the signal and the transducer might now know how to interpret the result.

    ReplyDelete

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