Shelves

This time of the year, I am usually immersed in planning for the spring and summer cruising season. Part of the process is staging materials deemed essential on allocated shelves in the basement. This year the shelves are filling much slower.

There sits the new AIS (Automatic Identification System). For those familiar with flying, it is the transponder of the watery world. AIS is simple in concept but immensely complex in execution. The device locates similarly equipped boats and displays their location on a screen for us to see, and broadcasts our location to them. Next to it is an ever enlarging folder with our and Carrie Rose’s papers just in case we need to justify our existence to the authorities.

There are the two solar panels I replaced last year that are going to be reborn because Dave tells me that one electron is as good as the next when it comes to recharging the new and larger batteries just installed. There is more but that is what I can remember without getting out of my chair to go look, and since the topic of this essay is a remembrance of Carrie Rose’s first cruise, I hardly think it matters.

It was the end of October 2003 when the monthly payments began. The boat spent its first half year in our possession unseen in heated storage in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. An entire winter passed without seeing it. As I think back, I am not sure why we never drove up to see her in storage but we did not.

The next time we saw her she was bobbing in a marina. It was mid May and almost blizzard condition prevailed. The wind was gale force and the temperature was hovering in the low forties. We walked to the slip with heads bowed into the northwest wind and the horizontal rain.

There she was, the occupant of our winter’s dreamscapes. We stumbled aboard and it was freezing. The previous owner had instructed me on how to start the heater. All I needed to do was connect the electricity. I knew how to do it but was not sure of the steps. Lenore, our now departed sailboat, was never kept on a slip always swinging on her mooring at the mouth of Montrose Harbor in Chicago, so I seldom had to.

The gangly yellow power cable was located in one of two dock boxes located on the salon’s roof. It was time to go back out into the wind and rain, and retrieve and connect the cable. The heavy cable is about as big around as a thumb. It would be hard to design a more obstinate thing.

The connecting points are an odd assortment of three curved appendages made to connect to only the thirty amp receptacle. It can only go in one way. In the best of times it is an awkward process, so when in a gale on a unfamiliar boat in an unfamiliar marina in the dark while hovering over water which will kill you in 15 minutes, well it puts a bit of an edge on the whole procedure.

With a little forethought, and some trial and error, the now connected cable swung between the dock and the boat. Back in the cabin, I striped off the soaked rain gear while trying not to drip water on the teak and holly floor. I made my way to the pilothouse, turned a few knobs, flipped a few switches, and heat began to calm our shivering.

The storm continued unabated the next day, the day we were to start our delivery trip back to Chicago. We stayed put and awoke to a calm crystal blue morning. It was time to leave.

Why we did not head south along the Wisconsin coast I cannot remember. It would have been simpler and less of a risk, but we did not. We headed straight east over the deepest portion of Lake Michigan (900 feet) for a 90 nautical mile cruise at 10 MPH to Frankfort, Michigan.

The trip south was a series of false alarms, large following waves, mal de mer on land not on the sea, waterspouts, and help from our friend’s on loan 16 year old daughter. What were they thinking! It took us a week longer than planned to arrive home due to 5 days spent sheltered up a river due to a late spring storm. But alas, that is Great Lake cruising.

Sixteen years have come and gone. Now the Great Lakes clear fresh water has been forsaken for the North Atlantic’s frigid brimming-with-life salt water. I will keep filling the shelves in the hope that the seventeenth year will not come and go without any log entries.

April 2020