Wayfarer 1321's Tip of the Mitt Adventure 2011
Tuesday 21 June pics - 1
photos by Ben Algera, Gary Hirsch and Uncle Al
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W1321 track on the 21st: another cool day as we headed downwind on a light easterly towards the immense Mackinac Bridge. As predicted by Gary who has passed under this bridge quite a few times, our winds virtually died in the immediate vicinity of the bridge. But after that, our east winds began a fairly steady upwards trend as we romped past the northern edge of Wilderness State Park until we could turn south onto a beam reach towards Charlevoix, our intended destination du jour. As the winds continued to pick up, Gary put his fine jiffy reefing system to fine use, mellowing our southward rush a little. A while later, we mellowed yet a bit more by urling the jib and continuing under reffed main alone. Early in the afternoon, the area began to fill with electrical activity as we began to cross Little Traverse Bay - which did not seem all that little to Gary and me! We lucked out in our first close encounter with the lightning and thunder as we were able to more or less skirt the tail end of an eastward-moving cell and got only a couple of scares from uncomfortably close lightning strikes as we moved ourselves and our beers well aft and away from metal boat parts. Shortly thereafter, a cell caught up to us from the northwest but again, only its tail end caught us and we got minimal close calls.



Shortly after that, the winds began to gust to speeds of what felt like nearly 30 knots (Charlevoix graph for 21 June 2011 above) and the wave action increased accordingly. To keep our exciting ride from getting too exciting, we took down the main and continued our beam reach towards Charlevoix under jib alone. Even so we occasionally planed and took some waves over the side of Solje. By about 1730, we were in the quieter waters and winds in the lee of the shore, and re-raised our reefed mainsail in preparation for a now rainy beat into the harbour at Charlevoix. Alas, our challenges were not quite over. We discovered that the strong east winds were blowing surface water from the large expanse of Lake Charlevoix out the narrow harbour entrance channel into Lake Michigan at a good three to four knots against which we could make no headway. Gary had just finished adding a tow line to our painter when our guardian angels, Jack and Joan Cramer appeared on the pier, having followed our progress via our SPOT. Jack invited us to toss him the line with which he promptly did a very passable "mule on the Erie Canal" imitation and we were soon safely and comfortably ensconced in the beautiful new marina at Charlevoix and its vry welcome hot showers!

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