Leland

Leland also known as Fishtown is a neat little town on the Lake Michigan side of the Leelanau peninsula. It has a small river that runs from Lake Leelanau into Lake Michigan. Along the river are several tourist shops, restaurants and boat excursions for fishing and trips to North Manitou Island.

View from the restaurant down the river.

View from a bridge just upstream of the restaurant which is on the right
View from downstream looking upstream, restaurant is on the left in the back.
View upstream from a bridge that was upstream of the falls
There were some big boats here. Notice that the furthest away is still taller than the near ones.
Near sunset. Clouds on the horizon prevented a sunset shot
I spent a little time at a nearby beach looking for Petoskey stones with no luck. The nice comfortable evening did not foretell what was to come.

Overnight the winds picked up a lot. I'm not sure when it started but when I awoke in early morning, the wind was howling and the boat was rocking terribly. It would occasionally rock so hard that it compressed the bumper enough to hit the dock. They must not expect such bad winds from the south since the opening in the seawall faces south. This caused the marina to be rougher than you'd expect.

The winds did not subside during the morning but we decided to make a go of it. As has been our luck lately, the high winds were out of the south, the direction we had to go. At first they were about 50 degrees over the bow so we could use sails, but we were going to have to turn 50 degrees which would have put the wind directly over the bow again. The waves were like the Straits of Mackinac and the one day on Lake Huron, 4 feet or so with 20+ knot sustained winds. Given that, we were not going to make our next stop in reasonable time and the winds were predicted to get even worse, 30+ knots, we decided to turn back to Leland.

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