7/29 From Pentwater to Frankfort

Had my fortunes changed? I left Pentwater with no known defects, and the weather was nice. Well, it was sunny, but my weather advisor Chris was unfortunately wrong - no winds worth the name happened for most of the day. As boaters know, that means the biting flies come out! The only way to escape them is to start the engine and move. And so we passed Big Sable point:

Progress was so good and the weather stayed nice (I even had a little wind for a couple hours) that I decided to press on to Frankfort instead of the planned Arcadia. Guess who I found there:

That's right - Hal from Tern

No day without technical trouble - on entering Frankfort I found that the rollerfurler didn't furl. That could have been a big problem in strong winds, but as mentioned there wasn't really wind and I just rolled the sail up by walking to the foredeck and turning the forestay.
The next morning I found the problem - three screws that hold the furler together were missing. I found one of them on deck, the others were totally gone. Easy to fix!

7/30 From Frankfort to Beaver Island

Well, before we begin, here's my technical problem of the day. And this one is entirely my fault, which makes it even more embarassing: The pressure water hoses I out into Caprice are mostly thick heavy vinyl, with a 1/ inch inner diameter and about 4 millimeter wall thickness. Mostly, but there's one hose where I didn't have any more of the thick stuff and so bought this hose from Home Depot. Big mistake - this one was much thinner, and rated 45PSI at 21 degrees Celsius. Unfortunately, I have 60PSI or so in my hoses, and the environment where the hose lives is warmer than 21 degrees. It's in the engine compartment which I guess can after a few hours reach 45 degrees. And here's the result: The hose survived about 3 weeks, and then split like an old balloon:

Such a small incident can actually sink ones boat - if the pump is accidentally left on when leaving the boat, and the hose bursts when you are not there, the pump will fill the boat for you until it sinks.

Anyways, let's move on to the next destination. I wanted to get to Charlevoix. As the day before, there was almost no wind from the start and I had to use the motor. I passed by Sleeping Bear Point:

 And then though the Manitou passage, where commercial shipping has to squeeze through:

This lighthouse is at the northern end of the Manitou passage:

And now the wind started. It was almost exactly from the stern. Gennaker time! I hoisted the thing and got up a good speed. However, it kept collapsing, and wrapping around the headstay. I found that the best way to tame it was to lower the mainsail. And then I thought of trying to do the double headsail thing of the passage makers. Unlike them, I need no double headstay. The Gennaker and the jib can coexist quite well:

I was making such good progress that I changed plans and decided to press on to Beaver Island.
How fortunes change - this was just a few hours later. That squall forced me to douse the gennaker, and even to furl the jib:

Finally, I arrived at Beaver Island in the night and anchored...