Day 35: Shore Day in Alpena — and more

September 13, 2021: A shipwreck tour — and I decide I’ve had enough.

I’m writing this a week after the fact so my recollection is a bit hazy, but I’ll do my best to get down the facts.

I woke at about 4:30 AM to the sound of Dianne’s snoring. I’d pretty much given up on the earplugs — they muffled the sound but didn’t completely mask it. I was mostly able to sleep through it, but there was a limit to what my brain could handle. So when I woke up at 4:30 my body said, I’m done sleeping; live with it.

I thought a lot about my situation. The previous evening’s dramatics — which were only the most recent in a long line of dramatics that I haven’t reported here — were weighing heavily on my mind. I noticed that they were becoming more frequent and worse.

If there’s one thing I learned during my ugly divorce nearly a decade ago it’s that there’s no reason to allow toxic people to affect my mental well being. Something had to give. It was time to take action.

The Money Situation

Early the previous day, perhaps at breakfast — I can’t remember — I’d asked Capt Paul for an accounting of our current monetary situation. The arrangement was that we’d each pay one third of the costs of the trip. The costs included charts for the part of the trip we were on, groceries and related supplies, fuel, docking fees, and other boat-related expenses.

Capt Paul had a worksheet that he updated daily from receipts for payments made. The worksheet had three columns — one for each of us. Whenever one of us spent money related to the trip and gave him the receipt, he’d review it and put it down in the column under our name.

Early on, I’d decided to pick up the cost of some of the fuel and docking fees as we went along in an effort to pay as I went. My goal was to have very little owed to Capt Paul at the end of the trip.

When I bought groceries, I didn’t usually hand over the receipt unless I bought items to be used for all of us. I have unusual tastes in food and beverages and I noticed early on that I was the only person eating some of the things I bought, so I stopped submitting receipts for those things. It didn’t seem fair for them to share the cost of things consumed by just me.

I also kept track of the receipts I handed over so I had a running total of what I’d spent. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Capt Paul — I did! — but sometimes things get lost or fall through the cracks.

Anyway, Capt Paul had done some math and told us that he and I were about even for spending and Dianne was about $600 behind us. It turns out that he meant that Dianne was $600 behind both of us, meaning she needed to spend $1200 to catch up. So we agreed that for a while Dianne would pick most of the expenses so she could catch up.

Was it a coincidence that Dianne had turned up the dramatics once she’d begun paying for fuel and docking on arrival in Alpena the day before? I honestly don’t know. I think she was foolish for waiting so long to start paying her fair share — doesn’t it make more sense pay as you go, spreading the costs over months on a credit card? Did she plan on writing a check to Capt Paul for her share at the end of the trip? And perhaps me? I couldn’t count on that. It became very important that I not spend another penny on shared expenses until she caught up.

A Long Shower and a Talk about Money and Conflicts

Back to Day 35.

At 5 AM, I could stand the snoring no longer and got out of bed. I pulled on a pair of pants and headed out with my shower bag — which was still out in the cockpit waiting for me — and went to the showers.

The marina at Alpena had sufficient bathroom facilities but the shower stalls were odd. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I was naked and ready to get into the shower that I noticed this. It looked as if my shower stall didn’t have a knob. It just had a metal thing sticking out of the wall where a knob would normally be.

Naked, I stepped out of the stall and checked the other two. (It was 5 AM, still dark out, and no one was around.) They were the same. What the hell…?

Back in my shower stall, I tried turning the stub and it turned freely. Then I pressed it in. It went on, splashing me with cold water. I stepped back quickly. The water ran and eventually warmed up. Spinning the knob did nothing to change the water temperature, but it was fine for me so I stepped back in.

The water shut off.

I pushed the knob back in and the water came back on, still hot.

For the next 15 minutes — because I really did want a long shower — I kept pushing the damn knob in to keep the water running.

Hell, at least I didn’t have to feed it quarters.

Finally, I stepped out, dried off, and dressed in clean clothes. I brushed my teeth at the sink, got all my stuff together, and headed back to Nano.

Capt Paul was awake when I got there. I’d told him the night before that I was going to breakfast at Biggby Coffee Roaster, which was about two blocks away and opened at 6 AM. I took the opportunity to have coffee out whenever possible in the morning; the Keurig-style coffee maker on Nano was not delivering the strong coffee flavor I craved — even after doctoring each cup with instant Folgers. Capt Paul said he’d come along. Then he’d invited Dianne and I held my breath, although I don’t know why. The mere idea of her voluntarily waking up to join us for coffee at 6 AM was laughable. She was always the last one out of bed. Of course she said no.

Anyway, while I hung up my towel and washcloth on the line, Capt Paul got dressed. We headed over there and arrived just after they opened.

I ordered a breakfast sandwich, which was remarkably good, and a latte. Capt Paul ordered a sandwich and coffee. We sat down at a table for two near the window.

We talked about a variety of things and eventually came to the topic of trip expenses. I’d added up what I’d paid and had arrived at a number well over $1900. He consulted his iPad where the spreadsheet resided. He arrived at a number for me just over $2000. (I think he’d found one of the food receipts I hadn’t actually given him.) We talked about expenses to that point: about $4200 or $1400 each. I’d paid $600 more than what I owed so far.

We did a quick analysis of what our current spending rate was. Early in the trip, in the Hudson River and Erie Canal, our overnight costs had been very low, with either low or free docking costs. Costs had become quite a bit higher as we stayed at more full-service marinas. Capt Paul estimated that the final total costs for my part of the trip — New York to Chicago — would be about $6,000; one third of that was my responsibility. I agreed with that estimate. Because I’d already spent just over $2,000, I probably didn’t have to spend any more money on shared expenses.

Dianne’s name came up — she’d be basically picking up the tab for the next three weeks to break even — and I decided to talk to him about my problems with her. Again. We’d actually spoken about her a few weeks before, although I don’t think I reported it here.

I started by pointing out her dramatics with the milk container the night before. That’s when I discovered that he hadn’t heard her initial comment. I set him straight on that. I pointed out that I hadn’t raised my voice. He agreed that I hadn’t.

I talked to him about her inability to do some of the more physical tasks required to work on the boat. Getting out on the gunwales to move to the bow while we were underway, for example. I mentioned her failure to put out the fenders in the stern more than a few times. About how many times she’d ask, in the same day, where we were going that day as if she never listened to or remembered the answer. We discussed her reliance on her phone and its map app for navigation rather than the Garmin chart plotter or Navionics marine navigation images that were running when he was at the helm. We discussed how she couldn’t help him find buoys to enter channels and get into marinas and how she consistently tried to use satellite view in her map app to find fuel docks — instead of looking out the window. We discussed her nearly constant recitation of irrelevant information from Google results on her phone into conversations, taking those conversations off course or just preventing the conversation from moving forward at all until she stopped talking. In each instance, I had solid examples that he was aware of. I wasn’t telling him anything new.

We talked a bit about personalities again. There were people in his life that were like us and they didn’t get along with each other very well either. So he had experienced the kind of conflict going on on the boat.

We talked about the guy who would be coming on board when I left in Chicago. It seemed that he was more like me than Dianne: he was planning to buy a Ranger Tug and was very interested in the operation of the boat. He was fit and able to do the more physical things required on board. We wondered whether he would have the same conflicts with Dianne that I did. After all, he’d be listening to her snoring and her incessant babbling about things that really didn’t matter for nearly two months.

We also talked about the configuration of the boat and how really difficult it was for three people who didn’t know each other very well to share the space. It was especially difficult up front where Dianne and I each had limited space for storing our things and sleeping. We’d each been sleeping in a confined space less than 3 feet wide and 6 feet long. There was no room to move at night. Even Dianne complained about the hardness of the cushion.

And that’s when he uttered my Get Out of Jail Free Card comment: “Well, I can do the trip with just one crew member. I don’t really need two.”

I Make My Decision

Done eating and talking we got up to leave. We walked back and I broke away to hit the restroom. When I got back to Nano, I heard Capt Paul and Dianne talking inside. I stayed outside on the cockpit to give them privacy. Eventually she came out. She ignored me and left the boat.

I went inside. “Did you talk to Dianne?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “But not about what we talked about.”

I think that deep down inside I was hoping that he’d either try to get her to offer to leave or ask her to leave. I now knew that was not something I could ever expect.

I also knew that she wouldn’t volunteer to leave. This was her cheap vacation, her chance to say she’d been on the Great Loop without having to own a boat, do much, or pay much for the experience. I knew that’s all she wanted because that’s what she told everyone we met along the way: we were doing the Great Loop! She’d also told me a few days into the trip that the only reason anyone completed the Great Loop was to be able to tell people they’d done it. (That wasn’t my reason.)

I made my decision right there. “Well, I’m leaving the boat today,” I told him. “I’m paid up until the end of the trip. You can keep the extra money.”

When he didn’t try to talk me out of it, I knew I’d made the right decision.

I immediately began researching flights home. I was booked on a First Class flight out of Chicago on October 5; I managed to change it to a First Class flight out of Chicago on September 18. That gave me 5 days to get there.

I was working on hotel accommodations for that night when Dianne returned. She went into our sleeping space and came out. She said something to me that I didn’t hear — a question, it sounded like, but uttered in a nasty tone of voice. When I didn’t answer, she answered it herself. I didn’t hear that either. I suspect she was keeping her voice down so Capt Paul wouldn’t hear her sarcasm. Mission accomplished; I didn’t hear it either.

She left the boat again, perhaps to get breakfast. I started packing. Capt Paul busied himself with other things. When came back in, he handed me a check for $600 — the difference between what I’d paid and the amount I owed to that point. I wasn’t a complete idiot; I took it. It would likely cost me $600 to get to Chicago to catch my new flight home.

(It was a shame he didn’t kick her out there; Alpena had direct flights to Detroit, which is where she came into the country from Canada. She could have been home that night.)

Capt Paul hung around until I’d finished packing. I moved all my bags out into the cockpit and we left on our last outing together.

The Shipwrecks Tour

There was one piece of unfinished business: the shipwrecks tour. When we’d first arrived in Alpena, we’d seen the tour boat go out. It looked like an interesting tour in a glass-bottom boat. I’d tried to get tickets for that afternoon, but they were only going out once a day. And that’s when we made a logistical error: we decided to book a tour for the next morning — Monday.

Why was it an error? Well, the weather forecast for Tuesday included a small craft advisory. That meant we couldn’t leave Alpena until Wednesday at the earliest. Three nights in Alpena? Yes, we were ahead of schedule, but if I were going to kill time, I’d want to do it someplace a bit more interesting than Alpena, MI.

Although I didn’t realize it on Sunday afternoon when Dianne bought the tickets — part of her picking up shared expenses — it turned out that didn’t really matter to me when the boat left Alpena because I wouldn’t be on it.

And yes, I could have skipped the tour. But I was actually interested in it. So I went.

Capt Paul and I walked to the dock where the ship was based. Dianne was already there. I stayed away from her. I sat alone on the boat, although Capt Paul did join me once.

The tour was three hours long, mostly because it took a full hour to get out to the wreck sites. We looked at two wrecks, both of which were in very shallow water. One was the oldest wreck out there — it had gone down in the 1800s. The other was one of only two in the whole area that still had its propeller and boiler; most of the metal on the boats had been salvage during World War II for use in building other ships. We could see the wrecks through the algae stained windows at the bottom of the boat as well as off the side of the boat when standing outside.

The boat swung around to give us views of Thunder Island where the Coast Guard had been based years ago. There was a lighthouse and other buildings on it. Then we went back.

Thunder Island, just outside of Thunder Bay, to the northeast.

I admit I was disappointed. Three hours to see two wrecks?

Back at the dock, I said goodbye to Capt Paul. He and Dianne were off by cab to go to Walgreens and Walmart. I walked back to Nano. I’d be gone before they returned.

Leaving Nano

I got back to Nano and called the cab company to take me to the local Holiday Inn Express, which was one of the few hotels in town. The hotel was crazy expensive but I wasn’t spending a minute more on Nano than I had to. I never wanted to see or hear a word out of Dianne again.

This is the last photo I took of Nano, docked at Alpena. Monday would have been a perfect day to continue our journey; I was wicked calm that day.

I got all my luggage to the pickup area. By 1 PM, I was leaving Nano for the last time.

That night, I slept on a king size bed, alone, in a quiet, comfortable room.