We Did It!

After a bit more hopscotching down the east coast of Lake Michigan, we crossed our wake and completed our America's Great Loop trip at the entrance to Holland Harbor at 12:53 pm on August 22. It would take another hour to reach the dock we started from at M.E. Yacht Restoration on Lake Macatawa. Wow! We can't believe we've done it.

The last few days were not without their challenges. We skipped over several towns we had planned to stop at in order to take advantage of more favorable cruising days and we cancelled our plan to revisit Chicago because our available window could not offer acceptable conditions for crossing Lake Michigan and getting back to Holland. Smart sailors do not trifle with adverse wind and waves on the Lake and a smart captain tries to offer his admiral travel on days that will make her smile--not lie on a berth and groan.

Even so, we suffered a long long day of 2-3 foot seas on the beam as we made our way from Leland to Frankfort. Katahdin easily handles waves of that size from any quarter but even with SeaKeeper, waves on the beam do make for some uncomfortable rolling around for the Admiral.

Our travel from Frankfort to Pentwater posed a different kind of challenge. The first relatively calm day in weeks brought out literally hundreds of fisherman. And, even though we were traveling several miles offshore, every time we passed a harbor entrance dozens if not hundreds of fishing boats would force us to slow down, weave and bob, in order to give proper way and not cross trolling lines. Frankfort, Big Sable Point, Manistee, Luddington--all mobbed with boats, each with dozens of lines out. The price you pay for the occasional great weather day! And, the scenery was just gorgeous. With no clouds, a deep blue sky, and tendrils of fog lying near the shore, the dunes, hills, trees and water proffered engaging colors and contrasts that make you love being on a boat!

But speaking of sand, the east shore of Lake Michigan seems to consist entirely of sand which was undoubtedly deposited by glaciers and then sculptured by wind and waves into dunes of varying heights and widths. Of course, people can't resist building homes on the shore and we saw houses on tops of dunes like the one pictured below that really made us scratch our heads. Didn't the Bible have something to say about that?

What turned out to be our last day, 80 miles from Pentwater to Holland, offered flat calm seas but they came with an hour's worth of thick fog along the way. And, wouldn't you know it, for still unknown reasons, our radar refused to work. Given that we spent years in our younger days sailing the Maine coast with only a compass, stopwatch, lead line, paper charts, parallel rule and dividers (well, and a pencil), a little fog on Lake Michigan without radar was a non event though it did slow us down to headway speed for the duration of the episode.

In any event, we made it from Pentwater to the dock in Holland in a little over 5 hours, celebrated our completion of the Loop, and then started the process of cleaning up and off-loading gear that we would no longer need.

The boat will be hauled sometime in the next few days, temporarily stored indoors at M.E. Yacht Restoration in Holland, and then trucked to Coastal Carolina Yacht Sales in Charleston where she will undergo annual maintenance and a number of other repairs and upgrades. We plan to pick her up in mid-January and head south to Florida and maybe the Bahamas. I can't wait!

And, for those of you who are still reading my Loop blogs, there will be one more sharing. reflections of our year on the Loop. Then I'm going to dock my blogging for a while and try to engage in life ashore!