Roger's City

It turns out that the things that I referred to as "gravel pits" earlier are actually limestone quarries. The one next to Roger's City is the largest in the world.


Some pictures of the Roger's City Marina.





Because storms with lightning were predicted, we left Roger's City early in the morning to get to Cheboygan before they started. Storms were predicted for 1 PM in Roger's City and 2 PM in Cheboygan. We thought that by leaving by 7 AM we'd make Cheboygan by 1 PM and beat the storm. The morning started out fine. We had decent winds from a decent direction. We started out power sailing and eventually went to all sail making progress fast enough to beat the storm. When winds got stronger, we reefed the mainsail. We started to see a darkening sky ahead that was not on the weather radar. We furled in half of the foresail expecting another storm like we had the second day on Lake Huron. The storm hit us hard. We saw lightning in the distance before the storm got to us. Fortunately that was the only lightning that we saw. But the winds picked up and changed direction. We had been going on a straight course but had to start tacking. We tacked toward shore along the edge of the storm. We started to tack back away from shore then furled in the rest of the foresail. We started the engine before things got too bad and shortly thereafter the storm hit us. Gusts reached 30 knots with many in the 20 to 25 range. The waves picked up and reached at least 3 feet. We got through cleanly, unlike the first storm on Huron. The storm was not very long, again only about 20 minutes. After that the skies cleared and the sun came out. The wind died and what little wind there was came from the wrong direction to help us. One surprising thing the we observed is that in all of our trip we had see few other sailboats, probably because there wasn't much wind a lot the time. On this day, in a storm with coast guard weather advisories, we saw five other sailboats in the storm.

The pictures are from after the storm. So they are not as dramatic as they would have been during the storm. We were to busy to worry about pictures during the storm.



After the storm we mostly powered to Cheboygan, wanting to get off the water as quickly as possible. The predicted storm was still supposed to happen. As it turns out, as of bed time, the predicted storm hadn't happened. 

One of the markers between Cheboygan and Bois Blanc Island, which is in the background.

This is another picture of how blue Lake Huron can be. Sometimes it is hard to determine the horizon.


Comments

  1. MonicaJuly 6, 2023 at 11:05 AM

    Wow, that's crazy. You just can't bank weather predictions 😔. It definitely makes for an exciting trip. Mackinac next?

    ReplyDelete

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