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On our first sail on the St.
Croix in 2010 Angie said that I fell overboard, she would have no idea how to get the boat turned around and save me. So we both signed up for the Basic
Keelboat certification from the
American Sailing Association (ASA), through
Northern Breezes Sailing School. We finished the class on May 26, and to try out our new skills, we planned a trip to the Apostle Islands for May 29-31.
We both left work a little early on Friday. The boat was already in the drive way packed and ready to go. This was going to be the first time Angie had spent a night on the boat, and the first time I had ever had two people sleeping on the boat. Enough gear and food for two people on a wilderness cruise fills up the cabin of a 16' boat pretty quick.
The drive up to
Bayfield was uneventful. Traffic was surprisingly light for the Friday before Memorial Day. We stopped at
Bella Curella Cheese & Italian Deli in
Comstock, WI. Angie got dark cherry ice cream and I got a small bag of cheese curds. The cheese curds were from the
Ellsworth Creamery, but they were in a vacuum sealed package with an expiration date 5 months in the future. Anyone who knows cheese curds knows they are best when fresh and they should squeak when you bite them. When we got back in the Jeep I opened them up and took a bite, no squeak. I ate half the bag anyways, and to keep from mindlessly eating the rest I put the bag in the center council.
We got to
Bayfield around 9pm, which was slightly earlier than I had expected thanks to the light traffic. We went straight to the public boat launch and rigged the boat. I pulled the half eaten bag of cheese curds out of the center council to move them to the cooler. The bag felt warm. The center council is right over the transfer case and catalytic converter. I bit into one anyways, and it gave a little squeak. Perfect!
The weather was sunny with a temp in the low 50s. After a warmer than average spring in the Twin Cities, it was easy to forget what 40-50s feels like and we both put on pants and sweatshirts. We went for a walk around town to look for some place to buy another layer of sweatshirts or jackets. There was a little discount screen printing place open and we both got hooded sweatshirts for $5. What a deal.
It was dark and we walked back to the boat and crawled in. We slept on the boat at the launch Friday night. There was room at the marina, but at $36/night we decided there wasn't much difference sleeping on the boat on a trailer, compared to sleeping on the boat in a marina.
We got up around 5:30am Saturday morning to a beautiful sunrise and a freshening wind from the South. Wind direction was perfect. We wanted to sail North to the light houses on either Devil's Island or Outer Island. We tidied up the boat and launched without trouble. We motored out and raised sail. With the light wind holding from the South we dropped the working jib and put up the spinnaker.
Angie took the helm first.
We lit up some cigars and put some Johnny Cash on the
Ipod. What could be better than a wife who likes to sail and smoke cigars? The favorable south wind held up for about 5 miles before it started to shift E-NE, and eventually stopped altogether. We put the jib back up as the wind came back, but it had shifted to the NE. When we were East of Oak Island we turned north toward Devil's, and it seemed that the wind shifted toward the North, keeping it right on our nose. We tacked a few times before the wind died again and we started drifting toward the rocky east shore of Oak Island. It was about 2pm and it was clear that we weren't going to make it to Devil's Island that day. We still wanted to explore a light house, and closest one was Raspberry, about 5 miles away. I started the motor and we took down the sails (they weren't doing much with no wind). Earlier in the year I had attempted to make a gasket around the fill cap on top of the motor as a little gas would leak out in rough conditions, but some of the gasket material had fallen into the tank. Before leaving on the trip I had cleaned the fuel filter on the motor and tank tested it, and it seemed to be working perfectly. But now, with a residual swell pushing us against a rocky lee shore with no wind, the motor was sputtering. Luckily the wind kicked up, we raised sail again and cleared Oak Island heading toward Raspberry. The wind died off again and the motor started up and ran OK, though it still didn't sound perfect and it made us both a little nervous.
The dock was pretty short overall, but plenty of room for a 16' boat. I mentioned it in my post last time I went to the Apostles, but the place is scaled for boats much larger than a Com-
Pac 16.
It made it a little difficult to get on and off the boat at the dock, but we were happy to be on solid land. The light house is fully automated, so there is no need for a light house keeper anymore, but from June-September there are tours of the old lighthouse and the keeper's quarters. It was only May and no one was there, so we went for a hike to check out the sand spit on the east side of the island, then came back to make some dinner.
Dinner was chicken Alfredo
penne and low-fat chocolate pudding. We didn't have room for a large cooler, so we brought canned chicken. It was our first time trying the stuff and the grocery store had two brands, Tyson and Hormel. Not surprisingly, the stuff from Tyson was better than Hormel.
After dinner we had a cigar and watched the sun slowly fade. The wind and light swell was coming from the North, but the forecast called for a shift to the South overnight. Directly across from Raspberry Island is Raspberry Bay, which offers protection from the East, West, and South. There were already 4-5 boats anchored in the bay. We heard a conversation over VHS where one of the boats mentioned a bit of swell still coming in, but 2 hours later none of the boats had moved, so we figured the swell wasn't too bad and the bay would offer good protection from the expected wind shift.
We motored the 2-3 miles across from the island to the bay and dropped anchor. There was still a swell coming in and the wind began to pickup. It was already 9:30 and Angie crawled into bed. I stayed in the cockpit to make sure the anchor held and to try to reposition the rode to calm the boat motion. I wasn't able to improve the motion, and it was holding, so I went down below and crawled into bed too. About 30 minutes later the wind picked up enough to howl a bit in the rigging and the boat motion was getting worse. I popped my head outside and there were large white caps and 15mph winds coming directly from the North, the only side we had no protection from. I closed the hatch and crawled back into bed. Both Angie and I were feeling a bit queasy and reviewed our options. All of the other boats were staying put. It was now dark and we weren't familiar with the approaches to any other anchorage. The motor wasn't in the greatest condition and sailing out of the bay would mean fighting the wind and swell. And as far as we could tell from the charts, there wasn't any place nearby that would offer protection from the northern swell and still protect us if the wind shifted south as it was forecast to do. We decided that the safest thing to do was to stay put and hope the wind and swell abated or at least shifted.
Unfortunately it only got worse as the wind built the waves up further. One of the other boats weighed anchor and motored out of the bay in the dark. Angie and I were both feeling like ping pong balls in a washing machine, and it was a waiting game to see which one of us would get sick first. I won't say who it was that lost it first, but it did happen, and it happened inside the cabin. Staying put was no longer an option. We were both sick, one of the sleeping bags was unusable, and neither of us wanted to be in the cabin. We put on a couple layers of clothes and topped it all off with foul weather gear, stocking hats, and winter gloves. We turned on the running lights, started the motor and pulled anchor. It was a rough ride out of the bay and we were setting in for a rough 18 mile motor trip back to
Bayfield in the dark, navigating the rocky shores by GPS. Once we got in the lee of Oak Island the wind and swell started to fall, and a few miles later the water was calm to 1 foot waves. A nearly full orange moon started to come up from behind Stockton Island. By the time we rounded the red buoy at Red Cliff we were cruising at 5mph, the motor was sounding good, and the lake was like glass with the moon lighting our way.
We made it back to
Bayfield at 2am. We had left only 19 hours before, and had done about 45 miles, about half by sail. As we came into the marina where the boat launch was we could hear a deep throaty engine idling. The marina/launch is poorly lit and as we rounded the dock toward the boat launch the mean engine was getting closer. I throttled down my motor, and it sputtered to a stop. A small cigarette boat was backing away from the launch. I tried like hell to get the motor started again, but it wouldn't start. Angie got up onto the bow to fend off, but he was able to steer around us and we drifted up to the dock. My adrenaline was pumping from the near miss. We don't have boat insurance and I thought we were going to hit the cigarette boat for sure. What were they doing launching at 2am? Then again, what were we doing there at 2am?
We loaded up the boat,
unstepped the mast, and headed for St. Paul hoping to find a hotel to stop and sleep at. By 3:30am we had passed a few hotels, but they were all full. We were both exhausted and fatigued and pulled over for a two hour nap. We eventually made it home by 8:30am. We both agreed, in the battle between us and Lake Superior, this round ended in a tie. We had made it to a lighthouse, enjoyed a full day of sailing, a couple cigars, and a good meal. The boat and equipment handled the conditions well (except for the motor), and we were able to navigate the 18 miles back to the launch in the dark. We'll be back to the Apostle Islands, but if we're going to continue cruising Lake Superior, we're gonna need a bigger boat.
