Crossing Lake Michigan TA DA

 We made it - we are safe in Port Washington. For us it was an exciting crossing, we skirted all the bad weather, just a few rain drops and some hefty waves. The voyage continues.

 

Hello Everyone -

What is the old saying about red skies in the morning? The day started off great. We left our mooring at 6:30 am and sailed out of the channel into blue skies a nice wind and fairly calm waters. Our heading is 274degrees north/west, across the lake to Port Washington Wisconsin.

 

A few things we learned--  don't believe the weather report, especially about wind speed and waves. I would also like to know how flies end up ten+ miles from shore and know our boat will be there. If anyone has a clue how to escape them let me know, Mosquito  netting the whole boat seems like over kill at this point. Another phenomenon we encounter is that as soon as the sails are set the wind shifts.

For awhile we shared the lake with two freighters as company- one running north and one running south. Weather still good and we were sail at 3.5 kts with an arrival time of 3am.

Then the wind shifted and the clouds started to surround us. As you can see we did stay in the sun shine but all around us were thunder storms, lightening flashes and you could see the rain falling from the clouds. We were scooting now at 5+kts with our whisker poll out.

Pileus over Cumulonimbus

There were some pretty fantastic cloud formations- This Cumulonimbus  with  Alto cumulus over the mast - got my cloud book out to check.

 So much for the prediction of 1-2 ' waves - we were rocked silly - the waves were moving south to north and of course we were going east to west.  Makes for an interesting ride and a few new bruises

 We finally could see land - and the sun beckoning us to safe harbor.

We made Port Washington by 8:30pm - not bad. No equipment failures. No one went over board, I fixed a hot dinner on the boat, and we are waiting for Jennie and Josh to join us tomorrow.