Madeline Island to Black River Harbor

Day 8, August 7, 2012

I am beginning this posting as we are motoring along.  I usually wait until the morning following a trip to write the blog but this trip is different from any we have had so far.  But I get ahead of myself.

Again last night, it stormed quite hard,  but again, we were tied to a dock and had little affect except for the noise of the rain pounding on the roof of the boat and the gentle rocking caused by the few waves that sneaked through the breakwater.  The boat is finally, after a number of years of attempting to chase down leaks, quite water tight as far as rain is concerned.  It is so tight, in fact,  that on cool mornings like this one the moisture of our breaths condenses on the portions of the ceiling that don’t have carpet glued to it .  It works out, that where we sleep, there is a band of such naked ceiling just above our heads and so on those special mornings we need not worry about our skin drying out.



Butane Stove in Kitchenette





Two Burner Electric Stove



Breakfast was a bit different this morning, we normally cook our breakfast on a small butane fueled one burner stove but since we are tied to a dock that has shore power, we are able to use the little 2 burner electric stove that I installed a number of years ago.  We had never used it before and were pleasantly surprised to find that it works very well.  It smoked a bit when we first turned it on due to some unseen organic stuff on the burner but the coffee perked, the bakepacker boiled the blueberry muffins, the bacon fried and the eggs turned out nicely over easy!

We awoke to a boat that looked as though it had been through a hurricane.   When we returned from the laundry last evening, we had tossed our piles of clean clothes in the boat and hurried of to the “Pub” for dinner and when we returned, we were too tired to put them all away so we went straight to bed.  It took a good part of the morning stowing the clothes and getting all of the little things that we had put off doing while we were away from civilization. 

So, we didn’t get on our way until about 11:00 and when we got onto the open water, we found calm seas and only an extremely light wind blowing from the east.  Our destination was to be one of two locations: Saxton Harbor, a distance of about 22 miles east southeast or Black River Marina, a distance of about 35 miles due east.  I put up the mainsail and swung to the east and realized that we would not arrive at either destination before tomorrow morning if we tried to sail in this light air.  So we started off using the motor and,  when it became evident that there was going to be no wind today, we took down the main and resigned ourselves to having a motoring day.  This also helped us decide which of the two destinations we would head for and it appears from the travel literature that we have that the Black River Marina would be a more interesting place to go and if we were going to motor, it would be easy to make before dark.



NO WIND!

SO, as I type this message, we are approximately 10 miles out from shore and about ½ toward our destination on a truly glassy Lake Superior.  The boat is rocking a bit as we travel along at 5.1mph due to the left over waves from the wind and storms of the last several days.  Janine is reading a book, as I have been, while the motor pushed us along steered by our auto-pilot.  



I was bored!  While Janine stood watch, I baked an apple caramel cake in the bake packer.  It is really easy.  We had premeasured the ingredients at home and sealed them in vacuum bags and all we had to do was add a couple of eggs, some water, and a bit of oil.  In 45 minutes of steam cooking we had an amorphous form of a cake.  It looks bad but tastes really good when smeared with cream cheese icing. 



Black River Harbor

We pulled into Black River Harbor at about 7:00 and were greeted by three of the boaters who had preceded us at the transient slips.  We were impressed by this tiny anchorage that is nestled up a narrow gorge.  After dinner, we watched a DVD on the computer which has seemed to have turned over a new leaf and hold a charge during any process I am doing.

Bed time