Home is where the heart (and the boat) is
Issue 51 : Nov/Dec 2006
Our boat had wintered over in Blind River, Ontario. WE had been cruising in the North Channel of Lake Huron off and on for about a year. Blind River is a nice town with a lot of nice people in it, but it’s a two-day drive from our house in the Minneapolis ’burbs. Now Mystic and her crew of two were going “home.” We transited the St. Mary’s River over the course of two days and motored out into Whitefish Bay at the southeastern end of Lake Superior.
The leading edge of a cold front was pushing through as we turned north to go up the eastern shore of the lake. The wind and waves behind that front were building.
We had not spent a lot of time on the eastern end of the lake, but somehow I thought of the whole lake as “home.” Except for the two seasons she had been on Lake Huron, Mystic had spent all of her 30 years on Lake Superior or propped up on its icy shore waiting for spring.
I briefly considered sailing, but the wind was building, and conditions were changing so quickly that I waited. We motored with the waves on the beam.
“Home” is an odd concept for me. We own a house in Maple Grove, Minnesota, that I call home. It offers accommodations I could never afford in a boat and houses the tons of tools I think I need. We also own Mystic (or perhaps she owns us) and she has adequate accommodations in which we spend weeks at a time. During those periods I think of her as home.
The waves were getting large enough to make things uncomfortable but I kept the boat at near hullspeed and pressed on toward a sheltered bay we had never visited. “Just a few more miles, Mystic.”
Karen came on deck and took the helm. I passed the watch to her with the admonition that things were building quickly. She nodded, and I went below. I checked “the nav,” which is what we call our computerized navigation program.
The rolling had eased a bit, but the pounding had increased, and the plotter showed we were on a new course that I didn’t think would get us shelter any time soon.
Back in the cockpit Karen said, “I don’t think we can steer the old course anymore.” I took the helm and turned back to the old heading. The next two waves rolled us down so hard the prop came out of the water. An Autoprop is very good in water but is an awkward unbalanced thing flailing away in the air. I changed course. These were young waves, less than an hour old. We’d been kicked around a bit as we were leaving the North Channel, but now when I looked to windward there was a clear sea horizon and a 300-mile fetch for that wind to work on. That felt like home.
At the end of our delivery we left Mystic on a buoy in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We will cruise in that area and take her to Superior, Wisconsin, by the time you read this. We’d traveled about 425 miles as the crow flies from Blind River to Thunder Bay. We didn’t sail overnight and, on all but one day, we anchored for the evening meal … pretty civilized, at least for us.
It was a seven-hour drive to Maple Grove. After we unloaded the car, I poured myself a glass of cheap box wine, kicked back in my favorite rocking chair, and said, “You know, Karen, it’s always good to come home.”
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
