On To Lake Huron

[Kyle]Paul and Lynne had repeatedly said that we had been really lucky to miss the swarms of fish flies, as the locals call them (American’s call them Canadian Soldiers). They are Leamington’s arrival of the Caddisfly plague we suffered in the Niagara River. (Actually, these ones are Mayflies)

The insects caught up to us again!

When I emerged in the darkness to prepare for a pre-dawn departure, I immediately realized our luck had run out. Every surface was covered with them. I hosed off the ones that had drowned in the dew on the decks, but live ones just replaced them. They seem to have no survival instinct whatsoever and will not flutter away if approached. Maryanne had a sickening walk to the marina showers where she said the crunching underfoot sounded like walking on gravel, except that the soles of her clean shoes ended up covered in bug goo. As I prepared Begonia for departure, my shoes did the same to the decks as I searched the sky in vain for the birds from Erie.

They thinned out after we left the harbor and headed for the Detroit River. They were replaced by a whole diverse collection of other flies. There must’ve been twenty-five types. If I were an entomologist, it would have been fascinating, but I am not, so it was just really revolting instead.

New arrivals stopped once we got to the Detroit River. Perhaps they didn’t like the smog or the dirty water from the smelting plants. We hugged the Canadian side because it is nicer and also because it is out of small-arms firing range.

Despite our early start, the current in the river was really killing us. We had pretty much a consistent knot-and-a-half against us for the whole thirty miles to Lake St Clair.

Just near the end, as we were passing downtown Detroit itself, the radio started crackling with all sorts of warnings of mayhem from an approaching convective squall line. The broadcasts warned of lighting, dime-sized hail and sixty-knot gusts. We furled the sails and started both engines for controllability. This is where being near the city worked for us. Our mast was nowhere near the tallest thing around, which gave all the lightning around us somewhere else to go. The buildings probably helped break up the wind as well. The most we saw was 47 knots and it was from directly astern. That actually helped to make up for our poor speed up until then.

Our passage started off well, but we were soon chased by lightning storms, and strong winds, and hamppered by conspiring currents (and a boat covered with mayflies)

Our twenty-four-hour watch system works great offshore, but is a lot less fun in a busy waterway. There is just too much going on for the on-watch to do everything with zero help, which makes it hard to really rest for the off-watch. Even a quick pee requires planning and preparation.

When Maryanne woke me at midnight, she had been glued to the helm seat for the last five hours straight and was ready to hand it over to me for the long, up-current trip up the St Clair River to Lake Huron. I only saw one or two down-bound ships, but the river was just bendy enough that I had to keep the wheel within arm’s length until it was her turn again.

A couple hours later, after needing both sails and an engine to fight the 4.3 knot current at the north end, she finally entered Lake Huron proper. We were back to having an unobstructed horizon to ourselves, which gave us the freedom to share lunch together inside, out of the wind, keeping watch through the forward-facing windows.

We arrived in the salt-mining town of Goderich, just before the wind turned against us, and also just before the sun set. Neither of us had slept well and we were really in need of a lie-in the next morning. The wind wasn’t going to make a dinghy landing on the beach tenable, so we would have no pressure to get up early to leave the boat.