Day 366: Monday, September 5, 2013
Port to Port: Grand Haven to South Haven, Michigan
Underway: 7:30 am Motor Off: 3:03 pm Miles Traveled: 48/53 Stayed At: Marina
First Things First: First tractor parade of the trip.
Mile 236 to Mile 289: These big water passages are a lot different than the Intracoastal or North Channel or even the river systems. You look one way and see the shoreline – here we have lot of tree covered dunes, sandy beaches and a few houses – and you look the other way and all you see is water. Plotting our course requires maybe 6 waypoints to get out of the marina, into the lake and straight down to the next marina. There aren’t many landmarks to measure your progress and you can only have so many pictures of sand dunes and water. We are happy, though to be having good weather and relatively warm temperatures for our hops down our final big water.
We left on time this morning and have definitely noticed the gradual loss of daylight – it is dark out at early, early, early morning – 6 am. I don’t think we will be leaving that early anymore this trip (I can almost here Cindy yelling yah!). We just left at our new normal time and it was chilly out until the sun got well above the horizon. We were surprised to find a solid east wind flowing off shore – even though we hugged the shoreline, the wind was able to build up a decent chop. Another surprise was the persistent northly swells rolling under our hull. Where do they come from? Some of these were a little exciting to surf down. We were averaging 6.6 mph with some bursts up to 7.3 mph. We both raised our sails right away to get a boost from the wind and help steady the boats motion. We didn’t take our sails down until we were less than a mile from the entrance to the harbor at South Haven. Carina was able to sail at more than 7 mph for over 2 hours on just wind power – no iron genny (motor) assist.
After a fast, lumpy and tiring ride down, we were happy to pull into the municipal marina and be perfectly calm again. We (especially Cindy) got a definite workout today. We caught up with Tour De Loop and Karen and Dennis on Shell Seeker who were already in port relaxing. We got our boat projects done quick and wandered downtown with Jane to check out the shops and restaurants of Grand Haven – quiet today but a vibrant and nice tourist destination on the weekends and in the summer vacation months.
Surprisingly, we know somebody who calls South Haven home – Warren and Marti on Jubilate – so we emailed them and they were willing to drive all the way down here to the marina (about 45 minutes) just to visit again and take in another docktails (thanks guys for visiting – it was a blast). They know Carina and Tour De Loop so it was another grand party sitting at a table on the deck in front of the marina watching the sun set in the west. We even had a free tractor parade drive by the marina while were chatting on the docks. We don’t solve any of the world’s problems but we sure have fun trying.
