We left Mackinac Island on a calm bright morning.
We crossed underneath the Mackinac Bridge and headed west to Manistique Michigan, which was a nine hour run.
The run was thankfully uneventful. Everything seems to be working just fine on Selkie.
The waters were calm enough that I did not have to turn on the stabilizers to keep Selkie in a comfortable position.
We passed Greys Reef lighthouse. That’s the only functioning lighthouse that we can see from our cabin.
Once we passed Grey’s Reef, we were in new waters.
Cruising to Manistique was easy, except for the nine hour part and the local knowledge we needed to navigate the shoals at the Manistique River mouth where the harbor was. The Harbormaster at Manistique provided that needed information.
The shoaling naturally occurs as sediment carried by the fast current of the Manistique River precipitates out and falls to the bottom where the current slows down as it meets Lake Michigan.
It wasn’t bad outside of the break water but once we got inside, we had to stick to where they had dredged on the right side of the channel.
The waters got pretty shallow. Selkie draws 4 1/2 feet, and we saw 5 feet at one point, which made us a little nervous as we prepared to dock. The Manistique Harbormaster came out, caught our lines and welcomed us to Manistique.
We secured Selkie and got our bikes out to ride over to the local grocery store to pick up a couple of critical supplies.
We then went back to Selkie and rested after that long nine hour trip.
It’s interesting that even after being on a boat for nine hours, but with not a lot to do, we get tired.
I think that the tiredness comes from the constant motion of the boat, the navigational responsibilities, doing my blog, reading up about places we plan to visit ahead and making sure we’re going in the right direction.
Staying on task for hours at a time is difficult to do at times, at least for me.
Regardless we made our dinner and then hopped on our bikes to go explore a little bit more of Manistique.
It’s a small industrial town with the only real Port of Refuge between the Mackinac Bridge and Escanaba along the northern shore of Lake Michigan.
It was a Friday night and we noticed that the lights are on over at the high school and we could hear a loudspeaker.
We decided we would go over to check it out and were pleased to find a high school football game in progress.
The Manistique Emeralds high school football team was playing another team from the Marquette, Michigan area up north.
They seemed to have the game pretty well in hand at the end of the first quarter as we watched.
It was fun to watch the folks cheer on their children out on the field. The small marching was pretty good.
Libbie and I stayed and watched a while and then we went back to Selkie for the night.
The next day dawned in thick fog.
We needed to get on our way, so we fired up the engine, running lights, GPS chart plotter, radar and iPad we use for navigation and crept out of Manistique.
It was a bit of a white knuckle trip for a while.
I used a stopwatch to blow our horn every 2 minutes as a fog horn.
Good thing we did as there were fishermen outside the breakwater who scrambled to get out of the channel as we crept by.
I’m sure the sound of Selkie’s horn as she appeared like an apparition out of the fog startled more than one sleepy fisherman.
After an hour, we broke out of the fog into a beautiful morning.
We were making a run to Washington Island in Wisconsin.
That means two points of significance:
1. Selkie has never been to Wisconsin.
2. Selkie has never been in the central time zone.
We finished another 6 hour run and anchored successfully in Detroit Harbor at the south end of Washington Island.
Being in Door County is a really nice place to visit.
The rolling hills with limestone bluffs overlooking the waters surrounding Door County provide fertile soil for the farms and forests in the area.
It’s interesting that this geology is part of the Niagara Escarpment which includes Niagara Falls four hundred miles to the east. The escarpment was formed by the bottom of the Silurian Sea, which covered most of North America, leaving sediment deposits millions of years ago.
It’s beautiful country, covered by deciduous trees, and some pine, with the occasional sugar maple was starting to turn bright red.
After anchoring, we got the dinghy down from the boat deck, loaded the bikes up and went over to Washington Island.
We rode the roads that begin at the ferry docks up to the north end of the island.
We found a beautiful bay with interesting limestone stones forming the beach there.
On the way back down we stopped at a local establishment called Nelson’s Hall. Nelson’s is an interesting place.
It was a speakeasy that legally served alcohol during prohibition.
The owner of the establishments got a pharmaceutical license to sell compounds and cures and proceeded to sell bitters as a cure-all for many ailments. He did it the entire period of prohibition.
Perhaps with Nelson’s being on Washington Island made the federal agents not so interested in pursuing action against him.
Libbie and I had our obligatory shot of bitters along with a beer chaser, signed our Nellies club cards and got an imprint of bitters with a thumbprint on our cards. We were officially members of the Nelson’s Bitters club.
I asked Libbie what was one thing she wanted to do while in Door County.
She said she wanted to go to a fish boil.
Door County fish boils are legendary.
While we were at Nelson’s, we met a couple a little younger than us, but locals nonetheless. We asked them where the best fish boil was.
The couple told us to go to the White Gull Inn at Fish Creek, Wisconsin.
We had our next destination.
We proceeded to run there the next day.
Libbie had been to Fish Creek before and coincidentally had a fish boil at the White Gull Inn the late 1970’s with her parents. So she was very much looking forward to re-creating the experience.
A fish boil is typically boiling of water in a large pot over an open fire, then adding salt, some seasonings, potatoes and whitefish, and letting it cook for a while. The exact recipes at each establishment are jealously guarded.
The pot boils quite rigorously.
Part of the recipe calls for throwing a quart of kerosene on the fire at the end, which causes the pot to boil over and, in theory, get rid of all of the “bad stuff“ at the top of the boiling water.
Whatever the recipe, it was very good, and we were pleased to be served a piece of cherry pie with ice cream for desert.
We are starting to move every day now. Being in unfamiliar waters is exciting. And we are finally putting some miles under Selkie’s keel.
It feels good to do so.
Selkie 