2013 Cruising Season Begins

We are back on the boat and under way. Yeah! Getting back to the boat was a two step process this year. We had planned to launch the boat in mid-May, but the folks at the boat yard said that was a bit optimistic, the cold weather was lingering in upper lower Michigan and there was still some ice around in early May. So we settled for bringing our clothes, boat parts, cruising guides and charts, etc. up from Cleveland then going back to Ohio to wait for a couple of more weeks. On our brief trip in mid-May, we stopped in Frankenmuth, MI, site of the country's largest Christmas store.  Jim made a motel reservation there and we got a sense of how early in the season we really were when we arrived and found this on the motel's sign board:

We never met the Birggars, but we both agreed that with all the hotels and motels we have stayed in in the last 40 years, this was the first time either of us had been welcomed on the sign out front.

We finally arrived to launch the boat at the end of May. I went to California for my niece's wedding and flew back from there to Charlevoix where the boat was. Jim took the Greyhound bus from Cleveland to Charlevoix, a 13 hour 3 bus experience he declared to be "just fine." Our friends Bill and Birute Fleck let us stay with them for two nights while we were getting the boat launched.

Here is a picture of the boat leaving the barn. Note the cool way the door folds up. These doors are huge, 25-30 feet tall and 50-60 feet wide.

Here she is reversing the process of last fall, being lowered back into the water.

This is the trailer that carried her the 2-3 miles from the barn to the boat launch. We don't normally think of our boat as a trailerable boat, but by the standards of Bergmann's boat yard, she is small.  There was a 55 foot Viking sport fisher waiting to be launched while Down Time was going into the water. That boat was so big they had to bring a bucket truck along to re-set the outriggers (the things that manage the fishing lines).  That trailer had eight sets of wheels, but they still drove it down the city streets from the yard to the boat launch.

Its great to be back on the boat, but we are freezing to death. The morning we left Charlevoix there was ice on the deck.  I didn't pack for this kind of weather, I've already had to buy a sweat shirt and a pair of sweat pants.  Jim says we'll look back on these days with longing when we are in Tennessee in August. I did find one unexpected compensation for the Michigan weather, however -- morel mushrooms. I found them at the Elberta, MI farmer's market this morning for $5.00 for 6 ounces of mushrooms. Fellow fungus lovers, eat your hearts out; fresh morels for less than $1/oz.