From St. Ignace, MI

We've come full circle, at least if we consider the Nordic Tug Rendezvous our starting point, which of course it was not since we came from Can 16 in Montrose Harbor, but as we are not returning there St. Ignace will work. (I think that was a run on sentence.) This AM we woke up to fog; always something interesting happening on the water.

Here is the plan . . . we will leave Carrie Rose in Mackinaw City. She will be missed in Chi-Town but the thought of racing 300-plus miles south just to race 300-plus miles north again in the spring ceases to make sense. So, Carrie Rose will be a hobo next year, wandering the Great Lakes and its tributaries.

This season we visited twenty-nine different harbors, anchorages and towns, some more than once. We could have seen more but the constant vigilance finally got to us, and we needed to sit still and recuperate. And that is what we have been doing in St. Ignace. Took the ferry to Mackinac Island, rented a car and drove to the Wooden Boat Show in Hessel, MI in the Le Cheneaux Islands, cooked dinner to use up our stores, changed the oil, made a few engine repairs and road our bikes to Straits State Park to view the bridge at a scenic outlook. The comings and goings about the harbor also provide much entertainment. St. Ignace’s fireworks were surprisingly good making me wonder why Chicago canceled theirs.

This summer Charlotte read books about assassins and I managed to finish an obscure book about post war Japan written by an Italian who spent the war with his young family in a Japanese interment camp. Maybe that explains the fitful nights of sleep. No TV, very little radio, some music from the iTouch, but mainly blessed quiet. I have become very fond of silence. I am not sure why. The silence in more then a few of the anchorages was on par with turning the lights out in Mammoth Cave, an overwhelming sensory experience.

We left Thessalon, ON and crossed the North Channel to Drummond Island in Michigan. Drummond Island probably should have been a part of Canada but through the fickle finger of faith, and a drunken British negotiator, it was ceded to the USA after the War of 1812. The harbor on Drummond Island is called Drummond Island Yacht Haven. A private marina that is located on the south end of Potagannissing Bay and on the northern end of the island, it is the only place to clear customs.

We tried to circumvent this necessity by applying for a new program called the Small Vessel Reporting System (SVRS) but were thwarted at every turn. It required a lot of legwork including personal interviews by custom agents. I only wish one of them would have admitted ignorance instead of doing it all wrong.

So, we wound our way through the small islands that protect the harbor and tied up to the wall to await customs. We had decided not to mention the SVRS, the less complications the better. I know it is common to feel guilty of some unknown infraction while going through customs and that day was no different. We had just approached the wall and the customs agent was there before I had even secured the boat. He caught me off guard.

So far the agents have been polite serious young men as I suppose they should be considering the amount of armament they carry. I pulled out my folder with passports, boat registration, etc. and forgot that our SVRS paperwork was sitting there for all to see and see it he did. His eyes lite up when he recognized it and he immediately began to ask question about it. We were the first people he had seen with it. The interview was going smoothly before that and now he started to ask questions concerning the process of obtaining it.

Since it was done incorrectly I tried to explain why we had chosen to ignore it. My heart sank. I thought here we go, complications! And I was almost proved correct when he said we should wait here while he called headquarters to see if he needed to do something different that he did not know he should do. Despite the awkwardness of the situation both Charlotte and I piped up, stating that we had been given instructions by customs headquarters in Sault Ste. Maries and would attend to it ASAP when we arrived Chicago.

He asked the name of the agent I had talked to. I did not have a name. He furrowed his brow and instructed me that it is always a good idea to obtain the name of whom we talked to. He was ready to move on and gave us our Custom’s Check In number and as he step off Carrie Rose Charlotte pushed us off the dock. I quizzically looked at her because she had been coveting an ice cream cone at the marina store all day. She said let’s get out of here and we did to DeTour Village where they stuck us down such a narrow shallow channel that I couldn’t sleep a wink thinking about how I was going to get out in the morning. But that is another story.