Mackinaw City

We have made it home to Mackinaw City!

Here is the first picture of us on our new boat in Mackinaw City.

Here are a few pictures of the trip on Saturday.  Still working on how to post pictures to the blog.










We got an early start from Grand Maris on Saturday just as the sun was coming up.







We had flat water all the way to the Soo.  It became more cloudy but warmed up once we got into Whitefish Bay.

We got to the locks and had to wait around an hour for an up bound salty.

The locking itself went off without a hitch.  

We spent the night in George Kemp Marina with a huge rain storm overnight.We got another early start, a bit later than the day before and headed down the ST. Mary's River.  We piloted from the lower station due to a light rain where we could see better using the wipers.  We kept it around 8 knots and found the engine noise in the cabin not bad at all.  At one point the fog moved in and had  to move topside to use the Radar.  The fog  didn't last too long but we stayed up top for the rest of the trip.  As we passed Detour Village the fog rolled back in and we had about .5 mile visibility as we rounded Detour Light.  We had a 2 to 3 foot following sea and by the time we hit St. Martin Light the visibility was down to less than a quarter mile.  The seas increased to 3 to 4 foot and we bounced around a bit up on the bridge.  There were some bad storms which went north of us and we just go into their fringe.

Fog was on and off all the way to Mackinaw City, some times we could see 4 or 5 miles then it would be down to less than a mile.  The seas calmed down a bit as we passed through Round Island Passage on our way to Mackinaw City.

When we got to the marina no one answered our call.   Dave the Harbormaster was just heading home and noticed we were coming in and gave us a hand in getting into our new slip. The slip is 17 feet wide and we are 14 feet so not an awful lot of room on either side.  We packed up all of our personal items and headed to the cottage.

All in all our shake down cruise back to Mackinaw City went well.  We encountered a variety of sea conditions, uncovered a few issues with the boat needing attention and learned a lot on how the boat is put together.  We also got a feel on how she reacts in different sea conditions and we are beginning to learn how best to handle her.

Tomorrow we will merge the rest of the items we bought as well as the remainder of items from Sea Jay with what we have on board.  Then all we have to do is figure out where to put everything as well as where to put all we will need for the Loop trip.   Then it's on to adding a few outlets, the Stereo for the fly bridge, contacting the sign guy to change the hailing port and the canvas guy about replacing some if not all of the isinglass. Our goal is to be done by Friday, we will see.