Coastal Western Michigan

We are about a week and a half into our leisurely trip down the western coast of Michigan. Part of the slowness is wanting to stop and see all of the small, cute, small coastal towns. Part of the slowness is that the rivers south of Chicago are still flooded and the Army Corps of Engineers and the Coast Guard have closed the rivers to recreational boating traffic. And a couple of days of the slowness are attributable to weather.

For the most part the weather has been fine, we did have one day of 30 knot winds and 4-6 foot seas on Lake Michigan, but we spent that day happily attached to a dock in Pentwater. Today's weather event was fog. We are in Whitehall, which is a town at the upper end of the 4 mile long White Lake, about half way down Michigan's west coast.  When we woke up this morning, the town and marina were shrouded in fog. About 10:00 AM it looked like the fog was lifting, so we left and headed for Lake Michigan. We didn't even get halfway down White Lake before deciding to go back. The fog just kept getting thicker the closer we got to Lake Michigan. We're getting smarter. We were planning to go to Muskegon, which is only 10 miles away. A couple of years ago, we probably would have continued, telling ourselves that the fog would lift. This morning we acknowledged that we weren't in any hurry, turned around and went back to our slip in the municipal marina.

In Ludington, MI, we stopped long enough to ride the last coal-fired steamship car ferry crossing Lake Michigan. The Badger was once part of a fleet of nine steamships that shuttled passengers, cars and railroad cars from Ludington, MI to Manitowoc, WI. In their busiest year, the ships moved 141,000 rail cars from Michigan to Wisconsin. The ferries were actually built and owned by the railroad companies. Before the ferries were built, they would unload the train car's cargo onto boats, ferry the cargo across the lake, then reload the cargo to train cars at the other end. Which, of course, begs the question why didn't they just build their rails to go south of the lake through Chicago? Jim thinks he heard that the rails in the Chicago area were owned by other companies and it was actually cheaper to build ferries that could move the loaded rail cars. Of course, they don't ferry rail cars any more, so who knows what the real story is.

S.S. Badger

Of course, since these ferries were built to hold entire trains, they have plenty of room to transport cars, RVs, and commercial trucks. One of their most frequent cargoes these days are windmill parts. There are several large windmill fields on the Lake Michigan coast already and more are being built. The windmills themselves are built in Wisconsin and then trucked to Michigan.  From a distance, you see the windmills but you don't get any perspective on just how big they are.  Here is a picture of Jim standing next to a part waiting to be loaded.

Jim and the windmill

We watched the parts being loaded in Manitowoc. It was quite a feat. The truck had two large trailer pieces with the windmill part suspended between them. It appeared that the windmill part could be raised or lowered by the two trailer pieces. The windmill parts barely fit (by height) on the ship, so they had been lowered  to nearly dragging on the ground. They would have been much to close to the ground if they were being driven down the road. To back the parts onto the ship, one man from the shipping company controlled the rear trailer with a hand held control, while the driver backed onto the ship. This clearly wasn't the first rodeo for any of the guys who worked for the trucking company. It was fascinating to watch.

Backing onto the ship

Maneuvering from the front

Not everything on the ship was huge. We also got a photo of this charming little camper. Our friends Walter and Margaret Boswell were in the market for a camper and we thought this would be perfect for them, but they found and bought something else before we could get this picture sent to them.

Whitehall, where we are today, is considered the first town "up north" in Michigan. From Muskegon south we will be in much larger cities and more populated resort towns. Stay tuned for posts from the southern half of lower Michigan.