Rollin’ Right Along

We’ve put a bunch of miles behind us this past week, and are taking a break to head back to Tahoe.

We won’t be in the Lake Tahoe area much this winter, so we need to prepare the house for another 700″ of snow while we are not there. We also plan to return through Austin, Texas to see our kids and grandkids.

An additional activity while at home is that Libbie and I will be returning to San Francisco Bay. Libbie will sail in the Red Bra Regatta (the RBR), an all-women sailing regatta that she founded with another friend.

The RBR has really taken off from its first race with 5 boats and is becoming one of the premier specialty regattas in the Bay Area with dozens of boats participating with all women crews. It’s very cool.

We will unfortunately not have much time for anything else in the Bay Area, as we need to get back to Selkie and move her down the River System.

I’ve another post that will give an overview of the River System, and what we can expect. That will be coming out in the next few days.

Libbie and I moved Selkie down the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan in less than a week. You can do it in four hours by car, but at 7.5 knots, or 8.5 miles per hour, it takes days.

We like to travel between 3-4 hours a day, but if we have great weather, with glass-like conditions on the water, we go longer if we’re on a mission. In this case, we made the trek from Fish Creek to our destination in 6 days.

Our journey down Lake Michigan took us from Fish Creek to Sturgeon Bay, Keewanee, “the other” Sheboygan, Milwaukee, Racine, and finally to Winthrop Harbor.

We surprised ourselves by being able to move every day.

Our stay in Sturgeon Bay was punctuated by a bike ride to West Marine to pick up some things that I had ordered for the boat. We also were able to replenish some supplies at a local target store where I was very happy to pick up a little dustbuster vacuum.

Although Selkie has been a champ, I’ve been frustrated with one aspect of caring for her.

The pilot house where we navigate from has big windows and the bugs come in through openings and fly against the windows trying to get back out until they expire. Their dessicated bodies are strewn throughout the pilot house.

We have a little shop vac type vacuum on the boat but it’s a little bit of a pain to go ahead and pull that out, plug it in and then vacuum everything out using the hose.

The dustbuster has turned into a wonderful asset. I can now not only vacuum up all the dead bugs, I can get the live ones as well. It’s been much better. It’s really kept the cleaning much easier and the boat looks a lot better because of it.

They say the simple pleasures are the best and I guess that would be true in this case.

One attraction we took time to visit was the Sturgeon Bay Maritime Center.

This museum has some fun displays and exhibits, and a large tugboat that one can tour with a docent.

Sturgeon Bay has a long history of shipbuilding, and is the home of one of the very few shipbuilders on the Great Lakes that’s left.

The museum also featured a 15 story tower that mimicked the pilot house of a thousand footer, the big freighters in the Great Lakes. Most all of the thousand footers were built in Green Bay.

In the engine room of the museum, Libbie found an old Hiawatha Outboard Motor, similar to the one her dad owned. It brought back some memories for her.

While in Sturgeon Bay, we met another couple on the Loop. They have a very nice 47 foot sailing catamaran that had no mast on her.

All the sailboats that do the Loop need to remove their masts to clear some of the lower bridges on parts of the Loop. Some carry their masts on board, but most have their masts shipped to the next big water where they can resume sailing. Then they continue motoring along the Loop until they can be reunited with their mast.

This catamaran was operated by a New Zealand couple who had been living on her for the past several years, and in fact, their boat was from New Zealand.

They had brought the boat a long way from New Zealand through Australia, Indonesia, shipping their boat through the Suez Canal to avoid pirates, through the Mediterranean, across the Atlantic into the West Indies. Once they reached the US, they started on the Loop. The trip over took several years, mostly due to the COVID travel restrictions. We admire their perserverance and their love of life.

They were wonderful and a very interesting couple to hang with.

While at Sturgeon Bay, they had anchored out and we had been in our slip and they stopped by on their dinghy to say hi. Over the next couple of days as we traveled down the coast together, we started to get to know them.

From Sturgeon Bay, we went down to Keewanee.

The weather was forecast to be rough for later the day so we made it an early start to get ahead of the rough water.

We went to Keewanee, which is, a pretty sleepy town. There were a few closed store fronts and on a Monday night there was only one restaurant that was really open in town, so we went there and had a good cheeseburger and a beer.

The next morning we took off for Manitowoc to spend the night, but the weather was so nice that we decided to skip Manitowoc and go all way down to Sheboygan Wisconsin, a 6.5 hour trip.

Libbie got us a slip at the Sheboygan Yacht Club.

The Sheboygan Yacht Club proved to be a real find. It was a really nice club of 400 members, and reminded me very much of our club in San Francisco, the South Beach Yacht Club. The clientele was very similar, and as with all yacht clubs like this type, the main interests are in boating.

However, the Sheboygan Yacht Club was different was that they had an excellent chef on site with a restaurant that was open seven days a week. Given the supper club influence in Wisconsin (supper clubs are a big thing here) it wasn’t surprising that with a good chef, they could stay open as much as they were.

The bar was also great. Libbie and I chose to eat at the bar and she had a wonderful pork chop while I had gnocchi with pesto and shrimp, which was excellent.

The next day we proceeded from Sheboygan to Milwaukee.

On the way down we stopped in Port Washington to buy fuel for Selkie. We buy in large quantities when we find lower prices. In this case we purchased 300 gallons.

We were in contact with the couple on the catamaran on the way down to Milwaukee. We decided that we all would get together for dinner.

When we reached Milwaukee, we went into a tiny anchorage by the aquarium in downtown Milwaukee. While entering the anchorage, we noted some state park docks. We chose to go to the dock instead of anchoring out.

After getting settled, we got together with our new friends and went into downtown Milwaukee.

We found a nice bar and got to know each other a little bit better. We then went back to our boats and had dinner together. It turned into a late evening.

They were going to stay in Milwaukee a couple of days to explore the town, but we needed to move on, so we said farewell the next morning, and went off to Racine Wisconsin.

Libbie used to live in Racine when she was a toddler.

Her dad worked as an assistant manager at the JC Penney company in downtown Racine.

Libbie had fun memories of her dad stopping by the famous Kringle Bakery in Racine and bringing Kringle home occasionally for a snack or for dessert.

Wisconsin Kringles are pretty legendary. A Kringle is a Northern European pastry, shaped in the form of a big “O”. It is a sweet pastry made of layers of flaky, buttery dough, with a filling and toppings in a wide variety of flavors. You can order them and have them shipped to your home.

We re-created that memory for our girls when we lived in California. We would order some by mail around the holidays and enjoy two or three kringles during the holidays with a cup of coffee or with friends.

Libbie and I decided to bike our way out to a Kringle bakery and were successful in doing so, but realized that it was a bit of a rough trek to get there.

Some of the streets weren’t the best for biking so we just kept moving out to the Kringle factory. We purchased some Kringle and then “beat feet” back to Selkie in the harbor.

A friend of ours from Northstar, the ski area where Libbie and I taught skiing, lives about an hour west of Racine.

She made time to visit with us. It was great to see her.

There was also a Docktales celebration with a bunch of Loopers that were in Racine preparing to go on the Loop.

We got to meet all of them, and, surprisingly, our friend knew a couple of them. They were ski instructors at the nearby mountain that was owned by Vail called Wilmot.

After Docktales, we went back to Selkie and had a good dinner with our friend.

The last day was all about packing and cleaning and preparing Selkie for a layover for a few weeks. We are headed back to Tahoe, and then will visit our children in Austin Texas.

The last day moving to Winthrop Harbor forecast called for waves from the southwest at less than 1 foot. We found the waves 2 to 3 feet in height.

Selkie handle it like a champ, and we tried to as well. Her stabilizers certainly helped.

We arrived at Winthrop Harbor’s North Point Marina and worked to get Selkie ready. I tied her up with extra lines and shut down all Selkie’s systems. She has not stopped moving since the end of July, and neither have we.

We all need a rest.

Libbie’s sister lives in West Chicago. She’s generously helping us out by putting us up and shuttling us around the area to Selkie and back, picking up needed provisions for the boat that we need.

We are thankful for her and people like her who have helped us out along the way.

It’s been a great few months, and we’ve traveled a lot of miles. In fact, since we’ve acquired Selkie, we’ve gone about 2,700 miles. It’s hard to believe really what we’ve done so far.

And we are only a third of the way through the Loop.

It seems weird that we’re going to be on dry land and driving cars and watching football on TV. We haven’t really watched any TV except for the occasional dinner at a bar while we’ve been out on Selkie.

Truth be told, we haven’t missed TV at all.

We will pick up The Loop again in a couple of weeks.