Sun Aug 27: De Tour to Les Cheneaux Anchorage

Rick helped me shake off dream debris with a rousing walk (down a busy non-scenic road), breakfast sandwiches and tea.  By 11am I was almost human again, and ready to pilot the boat off the dock and 100 ft around to the pump-out dock. We don’t need fuel but by the underlying odor of urine on the boat we decided that it was time to pump out the holding tank.   Whew - that really took it out of me!

After waiting for the ferry over to Drummond Island to get outta our way, we took off like a bat out of .... er .... a super slow 8 MPH bat.  (I wonder how our little bat from Canada is getting along) 

By the time we got going all the other looper boats had left, and it was just us, and this big guy, on the water.

Rick thinks these light houses are built like this to withstand winter conditions.  All the other equipment in the water, boats, buoys (no matter how big), docks, etc are taken out before the winter ice.  But these big lighthouses remain.

Mr Weather predicted a lovely day, and so we decide to take the opportunity to do one of our last anchorings of the year.  There may not be many places to do so on Lake Michigan so tonight we will drop the anchor and look at the stars. We are in a set of islands just off the Upper Peninsula of MI, called Les Cheneaux.  In French this means 'gutters', and you can see how they might look like a series of long gutters. (At least I think that is what Les Cheneaux means - hopefully not 'ghosts of the ancestors who steal your breath away while you sleep'...)

We are STILL in Lake Huron.  But you can see how close we are to the famous Mackinac Bridge (turns out it is I-75 - we could just drive back down to Atlanta in a couple of days) which marks the entrance to Lake Michigan.  We hope to cross under that bridge on Thurs of this week!

We arrived to Government Bay, our anchorage area, at about 3 pm after a uneventful cruise and dropped the anchor in about 10 ft of water.  We took the rest of the afternoon to read, clean the boat and not much else!   We are looking forward to an almost full moon and little or no wind tonight. We finished The Diplomat on Netflix - which left us breathless.  Thanks for the rec, reader Kim!

As the moon came up we enjoyed watching this skilled water-skier create huge spray in front of a setting sun.

And then came the real show!  Those of you thoroughly sick of incredible sunsets, skip to tomorrow...

For your visual entertainment I have flipped that last photo.  That, in my opinion, makes it really interesting.  It almost looks like a water color (or Bob Ross!) as the color bleeds upwards...  Good night!