Month: August 2022

The Port of Hamilton apparently was such a polluter that someone felt guilty and created the Hamilton Conservation Authority, which in turn created the Fifty Point Conservation Area, with trails, bird-watching platforms, campsites, and a marina.  We’re damn glad they did, because Fifty Point Marina is awesome.  Like on our short list of all-time stops kind of awesome.

Perfect weather to boot.  Cool enough to sit on the bow and watch folks go in and out as the sun went down.

The marina restaurant—which got horrible reviews—turned out to be excellent.  New ownership.  Never trust what some anonymous clown posted ten years ago.

Then off to the wineries.  The Niagara region claims to produce “exquisite wines,” so we hiked along the busy sidewalkless highways until we reached a couple of the local joints.

Meh.  Not worth the walk.

Fifty Point also is home to a couple of beaches, which attracted roughly a zillion beach goers over the holiday weekend.  Asaad the Uber driver wasn’t thrilled about being stuck in the long line of cars waiting at the pay station, but we still won because we didn’t walk home.

Did we mention that Fifty Point is a big birding area?  Not Big Bird, of course, but a variety of species stop by to “feed and loaf.”  That’s what the sign actually says.  The birds “feed and loaf.”  The author of the sign perhaps learned a thing or two from Brian of Nazareth.*  Dana snuck up on a family of barn swallows who indeed weren’t being very productive.

Monday morning we beat the crowd out to one of the beaches, just to check it out.  We see the attraction.  Soft waves.  Cool water.  And the delightful squish of warm goose poop between your toes.

All in all, a near perfect stop.  We were a bit concerned when they pulled a disabled vintage Bayliner up behind us—what with the gasoline that had pooled in it and all—but surprisingly it didn’t explode before we left so then we stopped worrying.

Yesterday we took the short hop to Port Dalhousie, where we’re staging for the Welland Canal.   Hey, what the heck are all these yellow markers doing out here in our way?

Up there someplace on shore is a Canadian military training facility, where real bullets sometimes fly out into that odd area.  We may have cut through one corner of it but nobody shot us, so it was okay.

Based on the cutesy and welcoming old-fashioned town sign, one reasonably might expect Port Dalhousie Pier Marina to be cutesy and welcoming.

Not a chance.  The two women running the place are so markedly unhelpful and impolite that we’re sure they aren’t Canadian.  But we sucked it up.  The reviews for the marina restaurant weren’t too bad.  Riiiight.  An abandoned hulk of what once was a restaurant but now is sinking into the muck doesn’t work for us.  As a wise blogger once said a few paragraphs ago, never trust what some anonymous clown posted ten years ago.

Much like Fifty Point has a beautiful forest, Port Dalhousie has a forest, which we can enjoy right off our stern.  Except this one is underwater.  Barely.  Hopefully we can get out tomorrow without a chainsaw, because we don’t have one aboard.

The marina may suck, but the town is kind of charming.

In addition to a carousel so iconic that it made the welcome sign, there’s a tree with undoubtedly the most bizarre trunk we’ve seen.

More importantly to our status as tourists, we’re only a twenty-minute Uber ride from Niagara Falls.  Which makes sense, because the Welland Canal’s entire purpose in life is to help commercial shipping companies avoid the logistics of portaging millions of gross tons along the Niagara River.

Wooooo!  Yet another opportunity for a line from “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” because in fact Lake Ontario “takes in what Lake Erie can send her.”  Which again is one of those confounding things, since everyone knows water flows down and down is south.  Regardless, all that Lake Erie water flows north over the falls at about 5.9 million cubic feet per minute, which sounds and looks like a lot but then we calculated it would take around thirty months at that rate to fill Lake Powell.

After we arrived, a nice boy with two extra boat-ride tickets invited us to join his family for a discounted price.  They even motioned for us to be in the family photo, but we demurred.  True story.

Anyway, Niagara Falls in fact is quite a spectacle, even on a gloomy day.

We’ve provisioned, inflated the big boy fenders, sized up an exit path through the weeds, and are ready to leave Lake Ontario.  Hopefully by tomorrow evening we’ll be on Lake Erie.

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*BRIAN: [Consider] the birds, then.

EDDIE: What birds?

BRIAN: Any birds.

EDDIE: Why?

BRIAN: Well, have they got jobs?

ARTHUR: Who?

BRIAN: The birds.

EDDIE: Have the birds got jobs?!

FRANK: What’s the matter with him?

ARTHUR: He says the birds are scrounging.

BRIAN: Oh, uhh, no, the point is the birds. They do all right. Don’t they?

FRANK: Well, good luck to ’em.

EDDIE: Yeah. They’re very pretty.

BRIAN: Okay, and you’re much more important than they are, right? So, what are you worrying about? There you are. See?

EDDIE: I’m worrying about what you’ve got against birds.

As a general proposition summer sunrises in Canada suck, because they occur well before normal people are awake.  But at least they don’t discriminate against crappy marinas, so we got to watch one yesterday when we headed off towards the fearsome Welland Canal.  To borrow from Cotton McKnight—one of the greatest sportscasters in ESPN 8 history—the Welland “separates the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the awkwardly feminine from the possibly Canadian.”*

Moments after untying, we immediately noticed a complete lack of steering.  Hmmmm.  This isn’t good.  Locks without steering seems kind of dangerous.  Fortunately a few fits and starts and reverses later the rudder disgorged all the weeds and order was restored by the time we tied up at the pleasure craft waiting dock behind Foolish Dream.

Erin was surprised to learn that she couldn’t tow her dinghy through one of the world’s largest commercial seaways, but with some pluck and Dana’s help she hauled it aboard.  Doug and Brian sat on Tumbleweed and clucked, Brian being the experienced dude we hired to satisfy the three-person crew requirement.

The cargo ship that threatened to slow us down mercifully stopped before Lock 1, so off we went at 9:00.  Here’s the thing.  The Welland Canal southbound takes boats 326 feet up to Lake Erie.  Eight locks, although because as discussed below Lock 8 doesn’t really count, the first seven average 47 feet of lift.   These aren’t those friendly little locks where cheerful college kids chat endearingly while you go up or down a few feet.  They aren’t the biggest we’ve seen, but given the surface area it takes a long time to fill these monsters.

All whilst Dana and Brian held crappy polypropylene lines that the lock guys threw down.  The same lock guys run from lock to lock to throw those crappy lines down.  One of our guys coincidentally was named Guy.

What really must suck is trying to hold a 740-foot ship carrying 28-thousand tons of widgets using a 3/8-inch slippery line.  So instead someone invented automated suction cups that clamp and center the big boys in the locks.  Way cool.

A few miles in we met our first ever double flight of locks, meaning two flights of three, going opposite directions.  By the time we popped out the top we essentially had scaled Niagara Falls, ten miles to the east.

This canal is such a spectacle that they actually built a spectator platform.  We waved to the nice people on our way by.

After Lock 7 we dropped Brian off a few miles from his house.  Great guy.  Knew all the tricks.  Huge help.

Did we mention that the Welland is a commercial waterway?

But this isn’t a just photo of us passing Baie St. Paul.  It’s mostly a distant photo of Bridge 11, also known as the Allenburg Bridge.  The Allenburg Bridge is famous because of that time in 2001 when the bulk carrier Windoc smashed into it.  Turned out the bridge operator was drunk and lowered the bridge just in time to shear off the aft high stuff, including the pilothouse and smokestack.**

Amazingly nobody was hurt and despite a fire that took a while to extinguish, no fuel or oil escaped.  Presumably the bridge operator didn’t escape but we couldn’t find any info about what happened to him.

A bit further south and a bit more recently, in 2020 the Alanis and the Florence Spirit rammed each other head on, which frankly seems impossible in the era of, you know, VHF radios.  We start talking to these boats in plenty of time to learn their intentions, for the express purpose of preventing Tumbleweed from becoming a hood ornament.  A game of chicken seems quite foolish indeed.

Wait a second here!  What the hell is a pontoon boat doing in the lock-protected seaway?

This actually is the Port Robinson Ferry, which takes passengers across the canal.  In the old days, the Port Robinson Bridge served the same purpose, with the added advantage of carrying car traffic.  But then in 1974 the cargo ship Steelton hit the bridge as it was lifting.

Our man Brian actually was on the scene and showed us a bunch of pictures he took.  Anyway, the people in charge apparently concluded that a small pontoon boat would serve the Port Robinson populace as well as any bridge, so now there’s not one.

Shortly before Lock 8, the Redhead sits in a confusing set of logistical decisions.  She dropped a load with no contracts for return cargo, so apparently has been waiting for weeks in Port Colborne with her fingers crossed, which doesn’t sound like a profitable strategy.

As for Lock 8?  Easy way to finish a long day.  Our first float-through lock since Nova Scotia’s Canso Canal three years ago.  Nice.

The lock dudes said we did the fastest passage of the year so far.  We’ll take it.

At the same time, we left Port Dalhousie at 6:45 a.m and hooked into Sugarloaf Harbour Marina in Port Colborne at 5:45 p.m., with not much relaxing along the way.

The totem pole with the hand-painted driftwood says we’re about 60 nautical miles from Erie.  Pennsylvania.  USA.  Unlimited high-speed data.  However, the predictors of such things say Lake Erie will be blessed with high winds and big waves until Saturday.  So we ain’t leaving before Saturday.

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*In a related pseudo-historical footnote, “Dodgeball was invented in 15th century Chinese opium dens, Timmy.”

**We came through yesterday, so obviously claim no credit for photos of the various disasters that occurred before yesterday.  We’re just including them because they’re cool, and to prove that we basically spent eleven hours in mortal peril.

Three days in Port Colborne may be slightly too many, and not just because it turned as hot and humid as Satan’s armpit.  Or Gainesville, Florida.  Which basically are the same place.  Mostly we just didn’t find much to do other than walk around town, although to be fair mostly we didn’t try.

So Tumbleweed finally received a good scrub down that would’ve been better if someone hadn’t snuck aboard and stolen the spider cleaner Doug is sure we had with the cleaning supplies.

About these Great Lake spiders.  They’re everywhere.  And they’re disgusting.  We complained loudly last time through, and yet nobody seems to have taken care of the problem.

Dana did venture out to the Farmers Market and wrestled home the biggest radishes we’ve seen.  Damn near the size of a pickleball, these things.

Doug perfectly timed a drone flight to coincide with the bulk carrier Patagonman exiting the Welland on her way to Chicago, where people eagerly are awaiting the arrival of bulk.  Tumbleweed is in there as well, down towards the lower left.

And that’s about all we have for our stay at Sugarloaf Marina.

One more thing though.  While wind-stuck in Port Colborne we had time to research the word “sugarloaf,” which in fact was the conical form of sugar before a Hungarian named Rubik invented the cube.**  If one needed a bit off the loaf for his or her tea, sugar nips were the implement of choice.  In an emergency, nips also could be used for removing an infected eyeball or extracting secrets from a recalcitrant prisoner of war.

None of this trivia will surprise anyone born before about 1850, of course, but it was news to us.  What wasn’t immediately apparent is the connection between any of that and Port Colborne.

Saturday rolled in with Lake Erie looking just as mild-mannered as we’d hoped, so we took off on the early side of pleasant.  By 7:30 we were all alone, zipping along against the wind and current at barely seven knots.

Actually we weren’t quite alone.  We were joined on the trip by the gazillion spiders and their plus-ones who came aboard for a big party during the night and then rudely refused to go home.  And yes, our photos of the flags over water all look about the same.  But this one is different, because it’s our first picture of Lake Erie.  We’re now only Lake Superior and a Great Lakes Cruising Club membership fee away from earning a coveted Admiral Bayfield burgee.

On big water passages we tend to have ample time for ship spotting, which may seem silly but we enjoy it.  Here’s Algoma Harvester.  She left Sault-Sainte-Marie on Thursday, heading to Baie Comeau.

We have a soft spot for ships in the Algoma Central fleet, because it was Algoma Equinox that pulled over a few days ago just long enough for us to get into the canal system first.  Probably saved us three hours, and certainly saved one of us a lot of swearing.

When Harvester reached the Welland she was about two locks ahead of Oakglen, who we also met as she steamed towards Quebec City.

Algoma Strongfield zoomed past us at 14 knots on her way to Thunder Bay, which every school-kid knows is about as far north as one can go and still be on a Great Lake.  Thunder Bay Port also is the tippy-top end of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Remember the Windoc?  She was a seawaymax laker just like these.  Remember that drunk dude operating Bridge 11?  He lowered the bridge after Windoc’s stem passed under, just in time to take off the pilothouse and smokestack.  These beam photos show just how it happened.  Despite significant effort during periodic bouts of cell service on Lake Erie, however, we still were unable to identify the bridge operator.  How he can remain anonymous in this digital age is a complete mystery.

Nothing got out of hand, but the waves were coming straight at us and built to the stage of periodically spraying over the bow.  At 10:10 we bashed our way back into waters of the United States.

This point always makes us feel strongly both ways.  Canada and Canadians are awesome, and the benefits of having an SAQ or LCBO within a hundred yards at all times can’t be overstated.  As a people, we Americans are more selfish, more arrogant, less environmentally conscious, and less polite than our northern neighbors.  But at least we figured out how to keep the British monarchy off our lands and off our money.  Anyway, we’re happy to be back where harbors aren’t harbours.  Plus we have better internet.  And it’s almost time for college football.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen a new state by boat, so we celebrated reaching Pennsylvania by photographing the Channel Lighthouse and what serves the citizens of Erie as a beach.  It didn’t look like much, but on the plus side of the ledger we also didn’t see any geese around to poop on it.

Our first pass under a glass pedestrian bridge coincided with our last photo of the maple leaf on our bow.  You gotta give it to the Canadians.  They have a very cool flag.

Now about Erie, Pennsylvania.  Back in 1812—after the British captured Detroit by using Canada as a launchpad—shipbuilders in Erie helped build a small fleet of warships, which sailed under the command of Oliver Perry.***  Perry then heroically led the Americans to several naval victories on Lake Erie, including the decisive and quite cleverly named “Battle of Lake Erie.”  This gave control of the lake to the good guys, although to this day the British probably still laugh about the dumb Yanks taking Detroit back.

The point of all this is that just across the bay from where we docked there’s a 101-foot monument on Presque Isle, dedicated to ol’ Ollie.  It’s a ten-mile walk over there so we’re making do with Dana’s photo.

We think maybe there are a bunch of other Perry monuments ahead of us, so this may turn out to be nothing special.

The plan was to stay two nights, play some pickleball, visit the maritime museum, and generally check out the town of Erie.  But then we looked at the weather predictions.  Then we concluded that Sunday was supposed to be a decent day to travel, while Monday was not.  So long, Pennsylvania.  We’ll do two nights in Geneva-On-The-Lake instead.

Hello, Ohio.  But first, on our way out of the Erie Harbor Channel we came upon Bruce, a Liberian-flagged cargo ship.  Apparently folks in Monrovia just can’t get enough of that sweet Pennsylvania gravel.

Another long day, made even longer by the significant pitching that started when the big fat rollers ramped up on us about six hours in.  At one point the Ashtabula Lighthouse seemed to invite us to safety, which was tempting.

But then we remembered that we don’t need the components of asphalt—which mostly is what Ashtabula has to offer—so we forged ahead to Geneva-On-The-Lake.

If a Pocono summer resort town hooked up with a West Virginia state fair at a karaoke bar and after a dozen tequila shots they conceived a lovechild, she would be GOTL, as the locals awkwardly call it.  This place is bizarre and fascinating and outdated and cool all at the same time.

You can walk out of your fancy dinner at a lodge restaurant and immediately mix with folks who are eating dinner at the ice cream/hot dog stand after hours of sweaty skee-ball.  We loved it.

We also loved going back to the state park marina, which was quiet and green.

This morning we found a window between the rain and the oppressive humidity to enjoy some of the extensive trail network around the park.

All things considered, the decision to ditch Erie and travel yesterday instead of today was a good one.  Small craft advisory on the lake today.  Big waves.  Being tied up in a quiet and green park is much more our jam.

We’ll see what tomorrow brings.  We’re hoping to make Cleveland, which we expect will be neither quiet nor green.

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*Hopefully this is our one and only opportunity to use this famous line, taken from Commodore Oliver Perry’s USS Lawrence battle ensign.  We’ve cleaned it up, of course, since Perry left out the apostrophe in “Don’t.”  We figure he did it on purpose to annoy his English adversaries, who invented the language.

However, for the record, if Tumbleweed ever comes under fire we’ll give her up as fast as Alabama fans give up brushing their tooth.

**Okay, we admit that the thing about Rubik inventing the sugar cube isn’t true.

***Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry should not be confused with his younger brother, Commodore Matthew Perry, who in 1854 led the first American fleet to visit Japan.  Commodore Matthew Perry in turn should not be confused with Chandler Bing.

A couple of years ago, Serial did a most excellent podcast on the Cuyahoga County justice system.  Lots of terrible people were featured, including cops and judges.  Which makes Cleveland—known to the rest of the country as “The Mistake on the Lake”—look really bad.

The Cuyahoga River runs through the city.  Historically the river was so polluted with chemicals that it caught fire more than a dozen times, burning buildings and boats along the way.

Health officials still discourage swimming in the river because of raw sewage.  Which makes Cleveland look really bad.

TripAdvisor says one of the “top attractions” is a chain supermarket.  Which makes Cleveland look really bad.

The Browns once drafted University of Kentucky halfwit Tim Couch with the first overall pick.  Which makes Cleveland look really, really bad.  The point is, our expectations were low.  As low as Vanderbilt finishes in the SEC East standings every football season.  As low as the self-esteem of any adult who yells “Roll Tide” or “Gig ‘em.”

Perhaps we’ve been fooled like the blind men touching an elephant in the old Buddhist fable, but the parts of Cleveland we spent five days exploring in fact were pretty awesome.  What wasn’t awesome was the trip in from Geneva.

The issue wasn’t the Perry Nuclear Power Plant cooling towers.  Those actually were sort of interesting.

The issue wasn’t even Tuesday’s unexpectedly-miserable beam waves, although they probably played some part in snapping off one of the bolts that clamped the rudder arm to the rudder post.  Meaning that fifteen miles from Cleveland we suddenly had no steering and it wasn’t because of weeds this time.  Fortunately Rick had the great foresight to leave a spare bolt on the boat for just this purpose, and fortunately Dana persevered in searching for said spare bolt after Doug had given up.  That allowed a repair that at least got us to safety.

Now back to stuff about Cleveland.  Starting with the marina, nicely protected by a pedestrian bridge so new that it appears on exactly none of our charts or on any map app.

Cleveland installed the $6 million bridge so that people who want to go from the Science Center to the park can avoid a grueling eight-minute walk past the Oasis marina.  Now the city pays bridgetenders around the clock to let boats in and out.  It all seems unnecessary to us, but we don’t live in Cleveland so it’s not our money.  The marina, however, is awesome.

That building on the left, steps from where we docked for a few days, is the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Being tourists and all, we popped over.  This place is top notch.

We do have one critical observation, though.  Placing the “Story of Hip-Hop” immediately next to an incredible Beatles exhibit is damn embarrassing.  In fact, the mere suggestion that rap is “music” at all is damn embarrassing.  At least they jammed it in a dark dead-end.  Apart from the hip-hop thing, it’s a fabulous museum.

FirstEnergy Stadium—home of the tragically inept Browns—also is right on the water.

Out front there’s a statue of Otto Graham, who was the Brown’s last competent quarterback despite the fact that he retired in 1955.

Jim Brown—an All-American fullback and lacrosse player out of Syracuse, and perennial Pro-Bowler—is on any short list of greatest NFL players in history.  Although he starred in such Hollywood classics as Mars Attacks and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Brown is not on the short list of greatest American actors.  However, he also got a statue.

Turns out statues are a pretty big deal around here.  The great Jesse Owens is honored with one, in part for figuratively shoving his spikes up Adolf Hitler’s behind in 1936 and in part for being the only compelling thing Ohio State ever produced.

And it’s not just statues of famous people.  Cleveland sports some cool public art as well.

The entire waterfront is guarded by a five-mile long breakwater, which appears to be constructed out of concrete Czech hedgehogs and serves to protect Cleveland from invading tanks as well as the raging waters of Lake Erie.

And on Thursday and Friday, the Lake Erie waters were raging.  Maybe not enough to deter boaters of more hardy stock, but we’re unapologetic weenies so we waited until Saturday to leave.  Which gave us time for a few more noteworthy things.  Like epic sunsets on the lake.

Dana even went birding, although this dude was six feet from the boat and she saw him from the pilothouse so she didn’t go far.

Here’s Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians.  We knew it was the home of the Indians because there’s a statue of famous fireballer Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller out front.*

What’s that you say?  They’re not the Indians any more?  No matter how one feels about the appropriation of Native American images and culture, “Cleveland Guardians” is a dumb name.  But now at least we know how they came up with it.  Because right outside the stadium—on both sides of the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge—the “Guardians of Traffic” have loomed over the city since 1932.**

Supposedly Bob Hope’s father participated in carving the eight forty-something-feet tall Art Deco figures that supposedly “typify the spirit of progress in transportation.”  All we know is that on our list of the greatest comedians in history, Bob Hope is pretty far down.  Well below Midge Maisel.

Wait!  How’s this for awesome?  Here’s the old man’s major award, right there in the front-room window of the house where Ralphie ate Ovaltine and almost shot his eye out with an official Red Ryder carbine action two-hundred shot range model air rifle.***

One last thing about Cleveland.  Turns out that downtown supermarket isn’t on TripAdvisor’s list of attractions because Cleveland lacks anything better; it’s there because it’s amazing.  Local chain Heinen’s opened it in a century-old former bank headquarters, replete with colorful murals and a huge stained-glass rotunda dome.  Dana says it’s the coolest grocery store she’s ever seen.

Anyway, although we thoroughly enjoyed Cleveland and admit to inaccurate prejudging, we ain’t moving to Cleveland.  So after one more night and a crisp scooter ride to get morning bagels, we left.

With three shiny new bolts clamping the hydraulic arm to the rudder shaft, we headed off today.  As a general rule, we prefer days where the water and sky aren’t the same color.  We mostly got fifty shades of gray.

Even more, however, we prefer the smooth water we enjoyed all the way to Lorain.

Originally we planned to have a guy look at a little electrical issue, which is the reason we paid in advance for a reservation in Lorain.  After we stayed an extra two days in Cleveland, however, we decided to live with the electrical issue.  But we couldn’t get our money back so came to Lorain anyway.  Then, and only then, did we read that Lorain has one of the highest crime rates in Ohio.  Well crap.

So it’s a crappy, cloudy, dangerous day, but at least the marina is solid.

After tying up and vacuuming the bugs off the cockpit, we sucked up our courage for a walk through town to Lakeview Park, home of Lorain’s pride and joy: the Rose Garden.

A bit of Lorain history.  In 1924, the Lorain-Sandusky Tornado touched down in Lakeview Park.  Heck, we didn’t know they even named tornados.  This one killed 72 town-folks, including a bunch right about where the roses are.

Also right near the roses is a semi-derelict Easter basket, only instead of eggs this one has a mix of flowers and weeds.

The basket brings back nostalgic memories of long-ago Easters, when our baby girls gleefully searched for plastic eggs we’d filled and hidden—Dana’s loaded with candy and Doug’s with lifelike rubber cockroaches—until one of them had the annual meltdown for one reason or another and the entire thing fizzled.  Good times.

We’d just about forgotten the whole “high crime rate” thing until we personally witnessed a felonious assault on good taste and common decency.  Does Ohio still have the death penalty?

Lorain’s number one attraction, of course, is the decommissioned lighthouse at the Black River entrance.

We have to admit, it’s pretty cool when they put the floodlights on it at night.

Tomorrow we start island hopping.

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*Despite his miraculous season as the Indians closer, famous fireballer Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn does not have a statue outside of Progressive Field.

**Seriously.  They’re called the “Guardians of Traffic.”

***“Fra-gee-lay.   It must be Italian.”  They were selling leg lamps at the gift shop across the street, but Dana ironically put her foot down.

With confidence borne of personal experience, we now can state with certainty that the west end of Lake Erie is far superior to the east and middle.  Maybe except for Lorain.  On Sunday, we rolled into the Lake Erie Islands.

On the way to Kelleys Island we cruised about six miles off Cedar Point, where sits one of the world’s oldest and largest amusement parks.  On a clear day with smooth water we probably could get a better photo, but Sunday wasn’t even in the same area code as clear and smooth.  And we’re not coming back.  We don’t even like amusement parks.

Kelleys Island is about four square miles in area, which we can attest takes less than an hour to explore by rented golf cart.  Still pretty enough though, even on a dreary day.

“Inscription Rock” is interesting, but not because the petroglyphs have eroded to the point you just have to trust the sign that says there once were petroglyphs on it.

The interesting thing is the sign itself, which also claims that the now-eroded symbols were “pecked” into the stone between three hundred and four hundred years ago by “pre-historic Indians.”   WTF?  Prehistoric?  Four hundred years ago Galileo confirmed Kepler’s theory of heliocentricity.  Oxford already had been educating students for over five centuries.  Shakespeare had jotted down his last word.  That’s hardly the stuff of the Flintstones era.*  About all we actually know to be true is that Inscription Rock is way bigger than Plymouth Rock.

Here’s another something interesting.

Again with the misleading signs.  The runway that dead ends into the roadway is barely long enough for our drone to use.  Without a doubt, landing one of those 18-passenger jets depicted on the sign would yield as many charred bodies as the number of people on board.  Of course, we dutifully stopped and looked both ways anyway.

Our loop ended back in “town,” which was small but fun.  Everybody said “get the fried perch at The Village Pump.”  Everybody was right.  The perch was delicious.

They put us nose into a narrow dead end, but except for the unnecessary A/C on the boat down there next to us, we had a great evening.  Foyle solved another murder.

Up early Monday morning, which allowed us to reflect on an artsy sunrise under clouds that suggested the possibility of impending doom.

The threats of waterspouts, however, didn’t keep us from the nine-mile journey around Ballast Island and into Middle Bass Island State Park.

Kelleys Island has a population of about three hundred.  Only about thirty people live permanently on what they call MBI.  Which is why Eddie’s General Store and a church make up the entire “downtown.”

But what the heck, we took another golf cart around to find the island’s hidden gems.  Like a boat filled with odd little figurines.

There aren’t enough kids to justify running a school, so they both go back and forth to South Bass Island every day.  By plane.  On what the sign on South Bass Island apparently says is the world’s shortest airline route.  This may not be the flying school bus in a backyard, but maybe it is.

Of all the crazy and amazing things we’ve seen while cruising, a pickleball court on a mostly vacant island is pretty near the top.

When it takes nearly half the residents to make a foursome, getting a game has to be tough.

We also stumbled on some glacial grooves, which are bedrock abrasions left on the Lake Erie islands during the last ice age.**  Pretty cool.

The most well-known grooves are back on Kelleys Island, but temporarily are closed to the public for reasons unknown.

In the late 1800s, little Middle Bass Island was covered with cultivated grapes and the home of what supposedly was the country’s largest producer of wine.  There’s not much left of Lonz Winery.  Just that tall thing in the middle of the drone photo.

The other tall thing is another one of those Perry monuments, this one on South Bass Island at Put-In-Bay.  The locals pronounce it “Puddin’ Bay,” which is ironic since they’re all yankees.

Anyway, the whole reason we went to Middle Bass Island is because we could stay at a state park and still go check out the more-hoppin’ Puddin’ Bay via Marty’s taxi boat.  Except then Marty decided to not operate his taxi boat on Tuesday, so as screw us over.  And it was too rough for a dinghy.  Grrrrr.

As part of our trip to South Bass Island we’d fancied a nice meal at one of the many restaurants.  In part that’s because the one joint with edible food on Middle Bass is closed on Tuesdays.  Double grrrrr.  So instead of a fancy meal at a swanky eatery, we cleaned off spiders and spider victims.  Triple grrrrr.  During a last quiet evening at the state park, however, Foyle solved another murder.

Speaking of pre-historic epochs, since the time Neanderthals used mastodon tusks to whittle boats out of granite, mariners intuitively have known not to leave shore when funky clouds loom on the horizon.  Wednesday morning funky clouds loomed on the horizon, with periodic bonus lightening flashes in them.

Of course, Neanderthals became extinct, likely due, in part, to their failure to master the use of radar.  Radar showed those clouds moving away, so we headed off for Detroit.  Motown. The Murder City.  The closest we got to Puddin’ Bay was on our way out.

Not much of interest between the islands and the Detroit River, although we were close enough to barely see a nuclear power plant just north of Toledo.

Toledo is famous as the home of Corporal Max Klingler, who was not a transvestite, did not successfully set himself on fire, whose family was not half pregnant, and whose non-existent brothers did not die in a boiler explosion at the Toledo Harmonica Factory.  We gave it a skip.

The water was a bit rougher than we prefer, but not surprisingly the Lake Erie waves went away right about the time we left Lake Erie, heading up the Detroit River.   Along Bois Blanc Island we passed another one of those boats that someone is using as a flower pot.  We’ve seen dozens of them, but none this big.

Bois Blanc Island, by the way, is known locally as Boblo.

The heavily polluted River Rouge dumps into the Detroit River south of Detroit.  Yeah, it’s a touch industrial.

Heck, even the ferries are industrial.

River Rouge is home to what once was the largest single factory in the world.***  Ford Motor Company still pumps out F150s up there.  They’ll probably build Doug’s Lightening some day.

Speaking of lightening, more storm clouds gathered as we approached the Ambassador Bridge and the city.  Excellent.  We love docking in the rain.

Fortunately things mostly cleared up nicely.

So we reached Detroit.  The list of important people hailing from Detroit includes VFL Aaron Hayden, both Mork AND Mindy, the Splendid Splinter, and Sixto Rodriguez.****  Doug spent the summer of 1986 working for the Detroit Pistons, but they weren’t in Detroit, they were in Pontiac, and since it was just one summer he wouldn’t count anyway.

Hey look!  It’s Canada again!

Actually, seeing Windsor across the river wasn’t all that interesting, since we cruised much of the day back in Canadian waters.

Then into the state park, which seems absurdly placed in downtown Detroit.

Remember all that cool art in Cleveland?  In Detroit, so far all we’ve seen is an odd man, with pipes in him, next to an abandoned area which may or may not contain bodies.  There’s no sign explaining any of it, so we really can’t offer anything more.

The good news is that despite walking to the restaurant twice—because the first time the nice girls at the hostess stand said we weren’t dressed to their standards—we’ve been here nearly six hours and haven’t been mugged.  We’re just here for tonight.  Unless Dana’s new friends talk us into staying.

So what’s the new plan?  Well the old plan was to join the bottlenecked Looper crowd in Chicago and wait impatiently for the Brandon Road Lock to open and the clog to flush through.  Then hustle down the rivers fighting for space along the way.  The more we thought about it, the less appealing it seemed.

Now we’re just going to take it easy, spend some time on the Door Peninsula, and winter Tumbleweed in Green Bay. Next summer, we’ll follow Deb’s recommendation and take a month or two to explore Lake Superior.  From there, we’ll figure something out.

So what’s the new club?  Well if we’re going to be intimate with all five Great Lakes, we should tap the resources offered by the Great Lakes Cruising Club.  We’ll add the GLCC burgee when we pick it up in Port Huron.  Not that we’re hunting trophies, but next year we can swap it out for the Admiral Bayfield.  Woooo!

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*“Oh that Barney Rubble.  What an actor.”  – Leonard

**Of course, given the whole “Pre-historic Indian” thing, it’s likely the folks around here think the last ice age occurred roughly around the time Washington crossed the Delaware.

***Anyone who hasn’t read Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line is missing out.

****Anyone who hasn’t seen Searching for Sugar Man is missing out.