Leg 32 and the final leg of our 2022 cruise up north
(to read about leg 31, Progress South to Pentwater, click here)
After six weeks of being away, we’re home again! Yesterday we crossed the lake from Pentwater, 77 miles away, in about thirteen and a half hours. It’s probably good we’re home, too, since today is miserably rainy and windy.
Most of yesterday was close to perfect. For the the first 35 miles we had sunny skies, flat water, and warm south winds at 8 knots, giving us a boatspeed of 5 to 6 knots with minimal heel. It was a swift, comfortable ride. We even saw several monarch butterflies mid lake over 30 miles offshore. The forecast called for the wind to shift to northeast at 20 by late afternoon with a chance of thunderstorms, though, so we closely monitored the weather.
By noon, I checked the weather stations ashore using the SiriusXM Marine Weather app on the chartplotter. Manitowoc, kinda north of us on the Wisconsin side of the lake, had a north wind at 8 already. 20 miles south of Manitowoc but still north of us lay Sheboygan, which still had a south wind at 10. I noticed a line of clouds far to our north that presumably cut between those two cities. I figured the clouds represented a front, and therefore our expected wind shift, though they otherwise did not appear threatening.
A few hours later, in mid afternoon, the line of clouds passed overhead but also evaporated. The wind died to almost nothing, and it was pretty hot. We considered going for a swim (one at a time since there was only two of us aboard), but then the wind quickly shifted to the northeast at 5 knots, dropping the air temperature considerably. No swimming after all!
The SailFlow florecast had called for very light winds for a few hours at this point, so we didn’t hesitate very long to start motoring. The wind filled in much quicker than anticipated from the northeast, though, and after only four miles we were under sail again. Initially we flew the chute, too, but we doused it after only 6 miles as the wind built a bunch more to 20 knots.
It seemed the waves built pretty quickly, too, but it may have been somewhat of an illusion. We had sailed across the slow moving frontal boundary, so the water we sailed into had been feeling the strong wind for much longer than we had been experiencing it on the boat. At least, that’s my hypothesis.
20 miles from Milwaukee, the skies became hazy and cloudy. On clearer days and nights we can see the city more than 20 miles out, but not yesterday. We did get a glimpse of the Viking Octontis, the same cruise ship we saw off Baie Fine a few weeks earlier, now on her way out from Milwaukee.
The lake became more boisterous as the hazy sky darkened with night. (Or at least, the waves seemed bigger in the darkness!) We put a reef in the main before it got totally dark. Just after dark I realized I had made a small mistake… I had neglected to set up our jibe preventer system earlier in the day. I like to use our jibe preventer when sailing deep wind angles, especially wing and wing in bigger waves. The wind shifted a little more east, and keeping the jib from collapsing on this deep of a wind angle in the waves was getting more difficult. Had we been racing, or had more miles to go, it would have been worth the extra risk of going forward to run all the preventer lines on the foredeck in the dark. Instead, we stayed on a broad reach and made two short jibes near the shore. I guess my mistake only cost us about 10 minutes of extra sailing time, if that.
We entered the gap in the breakwall just after 11pm last night. The buildings seemed to loom far above us in the haze, as we hadn’t been in a large city for weeks. Our home docklines had grown a little crusty from disuse, and our finger pier was filthy with duck poop since our slip had been vacant for so long. Despite living only a 15 minute drive from our marina, we spent last night aboard… all our clothes and food were on the boat, and our cars were at home, too!
We got our dock lines, shore power, and the sail cover on shortly before it rained. McKinley Marina is very well protected, so even as the wind picked up more outside, we slept well. We got home to the house this morning, and we relished in the luxury of unlimited hot water showers, laundry that’s not coin operated, continuous AC power, and good WiFi!
Sounds like a wonderful cruise, especially reading about it with boats on the hard, in the depths of winter!
Thanks, and working on publishing it in winter is a nice escape from the cold, too!