Well things have finally slowed down enough to write a post. We're finally underway into lake Huron after some MAJOR work on improvements to our sailing vessel. We've had a couple of KICK ASS sailing days to try our new toys and I am here to report that we are a lean, mean sailing machine. We found ourselves blasting along on a beam reach in 15-20 knots yesterday making 8 knots and looked up and we were right in the middle of the 2015 Chicago - Mackinac sailboat race, 107th I believe. 3 abreast in the narrowest part of the race course, gray's reef 15 miles offshore. We were so close to the boats we yelled across to them, "hey is there some sort of race going on?" I felt a bit like Forrest Gump crashing the Boston marathon.

Let's begin with the davits. These are articulating attachment hardware pictured for our 10.5' aluminum AB Inflatable RIB (rigid inflatable boat) that is our taxi at anchor. This is unofficially Pamela's boat we name Feisty as a namesake. We have a 20HP Honda 4-stroke outboard that we added planing fins to, so it gets up and GOES. Think "I'm 13 again and am racing around in a small dinghy that's slightly overpowered and dangerous"- it's a blast. There are three options for bringing your dinghy with you, tow it, stow it on the deck or add davits to suspend your fully rigged RIB off your stern. The first two options require removing the 100 lb engine using a block and tackle and hang it on your stern pulpit and in the case of the deck, then lifting the entire 110 lb inflatable dinghy up from the water and turning it over and lashing it to the deck ahead of your mast, generally covering your master stateroom hatch and getting in the way of the head sails. Outbound
makes theses works of art one by one for each yacht. Gleaming polished stainless that is breathtaking. We fell in love with the design when we saw them in Annapolis at the US sailboat show the center of the universe for all things Sail.

That and the overhead dish rack for our Galley. Another work of art in matched marcore wood for the interior, made by hand for each boat. Add to that a polished stainless pole for the future mounting of a wind generator opposite on the stern transom from the pole that holds our radar safely above our heads along with 2 GPS, 1 VHF and one satellite antenna for our weather service. We are a spaceship that travel the seas.

One of the GPS and the VHF antenna is for the new AIS system (automatic identification system that allows us to see and be seen by all like equipped vessels that ply the waters around us. It requires FCC registration that links our MMSI number to our vessel name, type and length to current real time data that shows your heading and speed. Day or night. Fog or Rain. Its amazing and takes the guess work out of critical, formerly hairy situations about if you'll be run over by the 1,000' long tanker that is crashing through water at 18 knts. Add this to our radar and we are an all weather operation. Today we departed Cheboygan MI in heavy fog in a narrow channel. All of the electronics overlay on the computer called a chartplotter. There was a car ferry blasting along inbound as we were leaving. They give one long horn blast before entering the channel but that was 1.5 NM from where we met them. No problem. Saw them both via AIS in the form of a little icon on the chartplotter listing heading and speed (they could see us too) as well as a radar echo plain as day. Amazing.

The next piece of gear making its way onboard is a hailing speaker. This is a small speaker mounted on our mast, facing forward at the first spreader. It really does three things (I only knew about 2 when we added it to our mast) - broadcast your voice over the loudspeaker like a cop telling you to get back in the car and as an automated fog signal to stop from having to hold a horn in your hand and keep track of time. Knowing we're headed to foggy places this was key. The last thing it does I found out about in Petosky sitting in our slip after having it added. It will broadcast the VHF radio so you can hear it outside of the cockpit or the nav station where we have a VHF radios. I was messing around with it while down below seeing if I could sound like a cop pulling someone over. I discovered I had been broadcasting on the emergency channel 16 my sophmoric banter and heard a very informal response loud as day over the hailer horn, "yea it's seems to be working" that some random person responded to over channel 16. I was mortified.

Once last addition was an on-board satellite broadcast weather system that is from Sirius. it overlays the current radar, wind, temperature, wave height and local forecasts and warnings onto our chart plotter. The nav station feels like a F16 cockpit.

The huge catch with all of the high tech gear is that you need to know how to install them so they work together. Finding a yacht yard that can do it all is nearly impossible, especially in the Great Lakes where many of these items are not seen often, especially custom made davits that don't work like regular davits in that they are lowered to the water to attach the dinghy and then raised by the power winch to their resting position. Notice how much room is UNDER them so you can still come and go from the swim platform.

We got lucky. Pamela and I looked for 4+ years for our home and one time about 3 years ago we drove 8 hours one way to Charlevoix MI to look at an overpriced complex english yacht by Oyster. There we met Jeff Glenny from Irish Boat shop. He knew this boat was not for us but still encouraged us on our dream and occasionally checked in with us to see how it was going. He told us of his own adventure sailing in the Caribbean and I vowed then if I could ever do business with Irish Boat shop I would. It was his kind nature and respect he paid us for honoring our dream about the impossible. Sell it up and move aboard. Well guess what? We did.

Well that time was the last 3 weeks. They are from top to bottom a service driven organization that has a shared common bond of friendship and loyalty to the boating experience with a good bit of cache. Pamela wrote of our experience with them so I won't bore you with too much detail but let me say that they welcomed us, made us feel confident in their ability and delivered the goods when the time came. It was the time between the work that made us so much appreciate our time in their boatyard. Passing the time with Carlos the guy who repaired our bimini on 1 days notice and returned it the same day, about our shared interest in soccer. Or Jeff and Roger about their teenager's summer camp - a right of passage in the Midwest. Or Bill, the lifetime gear head who started out as a river guide in the Teton's about the same time as Pamela worked out west. He was cautious to take on the Davits project and after three deliveries of parts from China he had to make a part by hand to weld from ½" stainless stock and polished it to look just like the the radar post installed originally and installed them in a half day on a Friday! Or Tommy the affable tech who when I showed him the hand-made work of art dish rack that was made ½ inch too narrow for our poles to mount said "no problem" and proceeded to install it like OEM. Or Lisa in service who sits out front and had to hear me come in 3-4 times a day for a week and ask if they could help with another project- always with a smile and cheery "let me see who can help". Or Sophie the confident young woman who ran up and down the docs meeting new boats arriving and even running me up to the grocery in irish's electric cart. The list goes on and on.

Kindness of strangers is what we live on. That and a little luck of the Irish stumbling into the longest annual freshwater race in the world. Come what may we'll be ready for it with our new gear. Did I tell you about the air leak we discovered on the supply side of our diesel system while doing some maintenance this last week? As Ernie, who is actually name Arin and has no idea why he's called Ernie, the 30 year mechanic from Irish said, 'it just doesn't make any sense...." well, hope it does to us before too long as we'll need our generator.......