Crossing Lake Michigan

August 7, 2024: I follow Plan A (sort of) and make a dash across Lake Michigan in better than average (but not perfect) conditions.

I won’t write much today because I just woke up from a three-hour nap and I’m not exactly wide awake. I suspect that a long day of tedious driving on top of a sinus infection that won’t go away on top of spending too much time walking around in Frankfort yesterday is making me feel as totally rundown as I feel right now. I’m not finishing the loop on a high note, at least not so far.

The Plan(s)

Anyway, when I made my rough plan for the last two weeks of the loop, I planned to cross Lake Michigan at Frankfort, MI, to Algona, WI. If you look at a map, you can see that Lake Michigan is actually pretty narrow right there. It would be a relatively short distance to cross: only about 50 nautical miles.

But as I made my way down the Michigan side of Lake Michigan, the weather was definitely favoring that side of the lake. I developed a Plan B, which had me continuing all the way down the east side of the lake and then cutting across near the very bottom to Chicago. Ironically, that last day’s crossing would be roughly the same as Frankfort to Algona. I also needed to lengthen up each day’s cruise to make sure that I made it to Chicago on time. (Sadly, I have a time constraint determined by plane tickets home on August 15. I’ve said it before in this blog and I’ll say it again: it’s best to do a cruise like this without any time constraints. But sometimes life forces them on you. In this case, I need to get my boat back to the Seattle area in time to attend the Ranger/Cutwater rendezvous the week after Labor Day.)

Fast forward to yesterday. I’ve been checking the weather with multiple sources every single morning. Tuesday was a bad weather day so I was stuck in Frankfort for two nights. But today, Wednesday, was looking good. I knew I could move on today and still planned to head to Ludington, MI — my Plan B destination.

I checked the weather again this morning, and it was actually looking really good. Really good not only on the east side, but all the way across the lake. In addition, the weather for upcoming days showed a wind shift with winds coming out of the west, as they normally do. That meant that future days would probably be better on the west side of the lake. Plan A was still routed on Aqua Map, which I use for my trip planning. I looked more closely at it and at possible destinations on the west side of the lake and realized that if I were willing to put in the extra time, I could actually go farther down the shore then Algona.

So that’s how I ended up telling my autopilot to take me to the channel just outside Manitowoc, WI, when I left Frankfort this morning.

The Trip

Let’s set something straight right now: the water on Lake Michigan was not calm. Calm is what I experienced the day I left Saint Ignace, MI, for Beaver Island. I suspect Lake Michigan gets that calm about 3 days a year and I happened to hit one of them.

But the water wasn’t rough either. There were very few whitecaps. The main motion was a combination of 0-1 foot waves and 1-2 foot swells. The waves were small enough to not really affect the boat much — heck, I’d had waves like that crossing much smaller lakes in Canada. But the swells, while widely spaced, did give the boat a good rocking. And, of course, the swells and waves were not moving in the same direction so they crossed each other for more random movement. They did not stay consistent all the way across the lake, although the swells were mostly on my stern, which was a good thing.

The effect of all this was a constant rocking and rolling motion of the boat. Fortunately, it was not violent, and there was very little movement of stuff that I hadn’t stowed. Best of all, neither of my pups got sick. (That’s a zero on the dog puke meter, which is always a win.)

I was still (barely) within sight of Michigan when I passed this tanker about two miles away.

If you’ve seen my videos or read other blog posts, you know that my philosophy for crossing large bodies of water is to put the “pedal to the metal” and maximize my speed. Because this water wasn’t rough enough to bang the boat as it crossed waves, I was able to set the throttle to 3000 RPM for 12 knots of speed. I got a little bit better speed when I deployed my trim tabs to lower the nose of the boat. According to Nebo, which calculates my average speed, including leaving and then arriving at marinas at much slower speeds, I averaged 12.9 knots with a maximum speed of 17.5 knots. No, I didn’t touch the throttle once I’d set it until I got into the channel at Manitowoc; the speed changes are from climbing and then surfing down the swells.

I cruised a total of 69.2 nautical miles. This took me nearly 5 1/2 hours. The track Nebo (and my chartplotter) drew is completely straight — remember, I used my autopilot’s Go To feature to go directly to my destination. (The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.) For at least two hours of this time I was not within sight of land — Lake Michigan is big — and my cell signal was sketchy or non-existent. I passed two boats along the way — a cargo ship and a sail boat — but they were both at least a mile away from me.

Here’s my Nebo log for August 7, 2024. Download a PDF log file with more info. Track Do It Now on Nebo.

Some Thoughts on the Cruise

5 1/2 hours is a long time alone with my thoughts. I did a lot of thinking, much of it about the cruise.

My biggest challenges during the cruise were, in order:

• Keeping my dogs off the area of the bench seat where I like to sit. Every time I got up, they’d move. They do this all the time.
• Staying comfortable and upright while the boat’s movement tried to either unseat me or knock me off my feet.
• Staying awake. With the autopilot driving better than I can and absolutely nothing ahead of us to give me a reason to stay alert, I had to resort to walking around the cabin occasionally, especially near the end.

About four hours into it I realized what a nightmare this trip would be if I were stuck in a boat that didn’t go more than 6 or 8 knots or was with a captain who didn’t like to push the throttle forward in boring stretches. (Yes, John, I’m looking at you!) Cruising this at half my speed would have taken twice as long — that’s simple math.

One of the things I love about my Ranger Tug is that it’s fuel efficient at slower speeds — like most boats — but it can go faster when I want it to. I was operating at about 87% RPM — Volvo says the engine likes to cruise between 80% and 90% RPM so all was good — and getting those faster speeds. (And yes, I know I burned more diesel than I could have.) But I also started wondering what it might be like to have a fast boat, like the R-27 that passed me doing 27 knots (per AIS) the other day.

Anyway, I’m done with my Lake Michigan crossing. According to the weather forecast, I can cruise again tomorrow, continuing my trip south on the west side. How far I go really will depend on what the conditions are like. (Most of the marinas on Lake Michigan are Safe Harbors, so you can pull in to any one of them if you need to, even if they don’t have a slip for you.)

But the weather looks sketchy for Friday and Saturday; I think I might be lucky if I can pull into Du Sable Marina in Chicago on Sunday as I’d originally planned.

My fingers are crossed. Can you cross yours for me, too?