Great Lakes Sailing

We left Harbor Island for Drummond Island Yacht Haven (DIYH) where we moored on the outer wall due to our 7' draft. DIYH is a great place with really friendly people, a small ships store, diesel, water, a laundrymat and, most importantly, showers. Unfortunately, their wifi was down and cellphone feed was spotty. What feed I did get must have been analog as I was unable to download weather maps from weather.com on my cellphone.

We had to leave during a storm as I was worried about being on the outer wall if the wind picked up. Our departure was a bit too exciting as we had to turn away from a big pile of rip rap leaving the dock.

The rain subsided as we entered the St. Marys River and our AIS begin to paint as many as five targets. Two of the vessels were cost guard vessels, a tug and a cutter. We were also passed by the supership American Century at a range of about 200 yards. This will be good practice for tomorrow when we complete our route to the "Soo".

We arrived at the Lime Island at 1630. Lime Island is a really interesting place. It is a former refueling deck for steamships and later freighters that dates back to the 1800's. It is now run as a "camping" park by the State of Michigan and in many other ways reminded us of Fayette, MI near our home port in Sister Bay, WI. We were greeted by the friendly attendants and were asked to register at the kiosk ($15). Getting into the concrete wharf at Lime Island is really easy and we never saw less than 20' depth (LWD) coming in. The only difficult part is getting up to the wharf from ones boat. We ended up rigging a "climbing" line to get to shore using our main halyard and a picnic table on shore for support. There is no electricity here.

We hiked around to some historic buildings that had been developed back when the refueling station was active. Stefan wrote:

"While exploring, we found a museum. This museum was very different though. Even though it's called a museum, I almost thought it was more like an old house people lived in hundreds of years ago. It was very nice though. It had a guest book, different bedrooms old stoves and sewing machines, and a swinging chair in the front for the perfect view of the harbor."

After dinner, we hiked some of the trails along the beach were we saw another bald eagle. Between the four of us, we have now seen a total of 5 of them.

We befriended some sailors on another boat headed up to Lake Superior. This will be their 4th summer in a row and they were a great source of information about the area. We hope to "run the river" with them tomorrow.