Where WhimSea Takes Us

Posted by Karen A. Brown

Today we begin another journey to sea. We have a long weekend a head of us, needing to return on Tuesday as Troy has class.

We woke in the marina to very light air and a wet one at that. There was fog that closed the distance of sight to about two miles.

Before we left, we had planned to send Troy aloft to rig flag halyards to both lower spreaders. We recently invested in a complete flag set and were anxious to fly them. It was harder then I thought it would be to winch him up and I was grateful when Christian of the riff Raft (a transient) lended a hand. Unfortunately, the drill bit broke before Troy could finish. We’ll have to try again next weekend.

We left he marina under power hoping with the coming sun the fog would burn off and we’d be able to hoist sails. Though the sun came up and could be felt overhead, the fog persisted and we were unable to sail. We saw an uncommon number of Lakers (six) appear out of the mist, but nothing more.

Arriving at the islands, we finally felt a good offshore breeze. Our intended anchorage on York was quite full (as well as were many other anchorages), so we finally raise sail and set out for Rocky Island where we anchored with only three other boats and set about having an excellent dinner of kabobs and corn on the cob on the grill.

We planned o go to Grand Marais today. We set the alarm for an early 6:00 call and went to bed early the night before. After one hitting of the snooze, we awoke to a great down pouring of rain, thunder and lightening and wisely went back to bed.

Since the weather forecast called for a miserable rainy day we decided to stay put and went ashore for a hike. We made it to the other side of the island quite quickly and followed another trail that led us past a fallen cabin, the campsite and to some private cabins where we decided to turn around.

The day has been very full of rain so far with no hint of letting up. I don’t think we’ll be grilling tonight.

The next day finds us still anchored off of Rocky Island since the day before was rain, rain, rain. The forecast is calling for the wind to come around, making our anchorage untenable. We’ll have to move. Not only do we have to move, we have to find someplace to stay out of the wind that was coming up!

We decided to head around Rocky to York. This will take some time to motor so Troy got ready to bring up the anchor and I got ready to steer. As we started to bring up the anchor, the wind came up and whipped around the island. It took us four passes before we finally got her up. Every time we got close the wind took our bow around the other direction. Eventually she was free and we headed out. After Troy took the helm and I tucked in under the dodger he got entirely soaked by a wave hitting the boat. It looked as though someone picked up a bathtub of water and threw it on him.

With the force of the wind completely against us and the wave’s breaking our forward momentum at every turn we were making less then two knots. Clearly we needed to go another place. We came about and headed for the sand spit off of the south side of Rocky. We would be heading more off the wind and would be traveling between Rocky and South Twin. We ended up spending the night there and heading home on Tuesday when the wind moderated.