Where WhimSea Takes Us

Posted by Karen A. Brown

Saturday morning dawned – well it was morning anyway – foggy. So foggy you couldn’t see the head from our boat. We were hoping to get to the Apostle’s this weekend since we hadn’t made it there yet this year.

Before we went anywhere, we had to watch the marathoners run by. Our marina is on the first five miles of the run, so we figured the runners would go by ½ hour after the start of the race. We walked up in time to see the first of the wheelchair group go by. They were followed by the VIP runners and then came the deluge. Because of the fog, you couldn’t see past the hill near Mel’s and with 17,000 runners it sure seemed as though people would just keep coming forever. They came out of the fog in a pack that engulfed the road and everyone who came to watch. Our hands became tired with clapping and cheering. Luckily some of the runners wrote their names on their t-shirts so we could call out individual names as they ran by.

After the race we returned to the marina. The weather had been calling for Southwest winds and it looked like it was trying to come up and blow out the fog. So we figured ‘what the heck’ and headed off, thinking we would motor part of the way until the wind joined us.

The wind never came. We motored the entire way and not only did no wind arrive, but the flies did arrive. We were attacked by a plague of mammoth proportions. Each of us furiously swatting at the biting, blood sucking devils. Our scuppers became filled with their corpses and our heads filled with their incessant buzzing.

In later research I learned that they were probably twice as bad because they were foretelling the storms that hit Wisconsin that afternoon. We watched the angry clouds as they raced up the peninsula towards the apostle’s and heard the warnings of the coast guard to mariners in the area. Unfortunately, Minnesota was also experiencing rain and the prospect of coming about and facing those flies was overwhelming, so we pressed on.

We arrived at our anchorage in York just a few minutes before the rain. I found out later that some of the marinas in the area were hit pretty good with Pike’s Bay in particular experiencing damage tot heir docks.

Sunday’s weather had called for a diminishing southwest wind, so we hoped we would sail as much as we could until it diminished. It never did. The wind blew hard and gusty out of the southwest all day. We spent about 10 hours beating into it always feeling like we were getting nowhere, though doing it pretty fast as we were fairly flying into the wind. We must have covered 70 miles to reach home, 38 miles away. When we arrived we were beat and felt pretty beat up by the weather, that’s for sure.