DeTour, Michigan

Waiting, once again, for weather. It seems to be the theme of the end of this year's trip.

We are in DeTour, Michigan, at the southeast corner of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. DeTour is a town of 325 hardy souls with one grocery store, three restaurants (one is actually the local bar), and a State of Michigan marina. Michigan has built "marinas of refuge" about 20 miles apart down all of its coastline, in recognition of just how nasty the marine weather can get in a very short period of time.

Down Time in DeTour

The first day we came in was lovely, but by the next day the winds had picked up and it had started to rain. After three days, the rain has stopped, but the winds are still high and coming from the direction we want to go. The forecast for tomorrow is good, so we're hopeful we can leave and go to Mackinac Island.

One compensation for spending time in DeTour is ship watching. DeTour is on the DeTour Passage, a body of water that connects Lake Huron with the St. Mary's River. The St. Mary's River is the connecting point between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, through the Sault St. Marie Locks. I think this is the busiest commercial waterway we have been on since Norfolk, Virginia.

There are two types of commercial boats streaming up and down the river, lakers and salties. Lakers are the inland ships that move materials between the lake ports, for example taking taconite (an iron-bearing sedimentary rock) from the mines in Duluth to the steel mills in Chicago and Gary, Indiana. Salties are the ships that move things from Great Lakes ports across oceans. I'm not sure which one this is, but it was big. We have a book on board titled Know Your Ships that gives information about the boats that travel up here. A length of 600 feet with a width of 60 feet and a carrying capacity of 20,000 tons is a fairly standard ship up here.

Saltie or laker?

We are only three good weather days away from where we will store the boat, although we have planned to stop along the way and see some of the sites. Think good weather thoughts for us. Otherwise this year's water cruise may end more abruptly than we had planned and we may find ourselves seeing this last of this year's sights from a rental car.