as I type this, we are cruising across Lake Erie on our way to Cleveland. Since the last post, we’ve covered a lot of territory and had some interesting experiences.
we ended up in Roger city Michigan, which we loved. The Harbor Master was awesome. Helped us out tremendously and just generally a really nice guy. The little town had three different deli/meat markets. Lots of Polish influence in the town. Great Keilbasa, Brats, and other types of meat.
after Rogers City we travelled to Sanilac MI. Another really cool town. There is a great bar called Alli’s. It looks like Fred Sanfords back yard!! Very interesting place and again nice people. That saying “mid-west nice “ is really true! We had to replace another fuse on the house bank. I think I didn’t have it secured properly and it shorted. My cordless drill died-so a trip to the oldest hardware shop in MI got me a new one! We also had coolant leaking from the port engine again. There was a fair amount on the absorbing pads. I after searching for a long time I found the leak – one of the hose clamps on the main hose to the block had loosened slightly and was leaking. So far no more leaks!!!
We left Sanilac heading to Detroit and made good time to the Detroit River. We started to look for a place to dock for the night and was having no luck. We tried 20 marinas until we found Gibralter boat yard. They had a slip on the wall for us. That was great because there was not a good anchorage around.
There are a couple of marinas that use same canal to enter. WELL, there is a hidden stone wall just under the surface ( the Army Corps of Engineers put it there to direct water to the canal).. guess what? The wall was not marked at all. We hit our props!! We then managed to get to the wall to tie up. The people there said “ yes that wall you need to stay away from. All the locals know about it!” We are not locals, far from it, we had no idea and there was no visual marker. How were we supposed to know!!!
after getting tied up we met another Jeff on the dock. Super nice guy. He invited us to his birthday party that night. Of course, we went. We met a few people there, but spent most of our time talking to Don and Karen. Local boaters with vast amount of experience. They insisted on picking us up in the morning to take us to breakfast! We were really grateful! Once we got back to the marina the owner lifted our boat so we could check the props. Fortunately only the starboard one hit and it was minimal. I straightened it out with a pipe wrench and back in the water we went. Oh yes one other thing, our fresh water pump died. I was lucky to have another on board and it was easy to change! We headed out on Mothers Day for Put-In-Bay Ohio.
Put-In-Bay is really cool. They call it the Ohio Key West! It was a tough 30 mile ride over 2-4’ seas with occasional 7’s on our beam to get there, but we made it. Our problem there was our power cord kept blowing their GFCI breaker. They said “it’s very sensitive “ i guess so. We couldn’t plug in, so we ran the generator all night!
As started off saying, I can see the big buildings of Cleveland in the horizon. Seas are 2’ or less ( thank goodness). We are going to have to anchor out tonight because we can’t find a marina who will take us. The anchorage is well protected so we should be fine. We will take the dinghy in to town! I hope we can get to the rock n roll hall of fame.
stay tuned for more adventures! Thanks to all of you for keeping up with our travels and the words of encouragement!
