Yes friends, we have made the great crossing to Wisconsin and are eating cheese as I write. Now let me catch you up since we left Leland, MI.
The crews of Cbay and Kismet left Leland on Monday at 0700 for the short run of 36 miles down to Frankfort, another quaint little town on the east coast of Lake Michigan. The run was without incident and we were able to make a nice run down to Point Betsie Light House on plane. This was the first real test of the JB Quick Weld fix that I put on those impellers. I am happy to report that as of 1230 this morning, when I finally closed them back up, that they were just fine and not walking out anymore. Of course the real problem is the one I cannot answer. Is it going to be possible to get them out when that eventuality arises? I guess we will cross that bridge if we ever get there and I do not expect to have to worry about it until this trip is long over if saying so does not jinx us. (As I go back and edit this blog on 10/21/13 I know the answer, but I would still have done it anyway. Maybe I will write about taking those keys out one day.
Now Frankfort is a nice place and we even had cable TV for the first time in a long while. Jan could get a FOX News fix and catch up on the national picture. It seems things are going fairly well. The price of gas is up, employment is down and Romney has raised more money than Obama for 3 months running. That is a perfect combination as far as we can see. (In hindsight how naive we were.)
The sunsets in Frankfort are spectacular as you can plainly see.
Everyone becomes a kid again at the beach especially at sunset.
But we will only see just one sunset here because on Tuesday we switched our plans a bit and ran across Lake Michigan to Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The original plan had been to ride down the east coast to Luddington, spend a couple of days and cross at the narrow part of the lake following the ferry route which is only 60 miles across. But our friend Dean has allowed himself to run out of prescription medicine and has been out for some time. His doctor is licensed in Wisconsin so the solution was simple. We will just strike a straight line from Frankfort to Manitowoc and take the longest way possible crossing every major shipping lane on Lake Michigan! See I told you it was simple.
We left Frankfort in the predawn at 0630 with a fog rolling down the river toward the lake. We had to hustle to get out of the harbor before it enveloped everything including us. That being accomplished, we set a course for Manitowoc and boosted the radar out to 6 miles and expanded the chart plotters to show the AIS for the entire crossing. Now we could see all boats and ships that posed a danger to our crossing and their speed. It is sort of like PAC Man. Now all we had to do was dodge everything out there by either crossing in front of or just behind them weaving our way over 80 miles to the prize which was a safe harbor on the other side.
The time zone that divides EST and CST is out in the middle somewhere so we gained an hour crossing. This put us in Manitowoc Harbor by 1330 and Beth borrowed one of our bikes and pedaled to Walgreen’s which had all the prescriptions ready thus saving Dean’s life. You don’t believe it? Well he is still alive isn’t he?
The only excitement on the whole crossing was two guys who called the USCG to report a low flying plane that they thought was crashing. Turns out it was a practice run up the coast and cleared by the authorities. Not sure why they were flying a plane thirty feet above the water but guess they had a reason. Scared a couple of boaters though. Glad it was not us.
