Today we awoke to a gorgeous sunny day, Our neighbors Marcella and John (whom we met when they wanted to come aboard to check out Latitude Adjustment as they are interested in possibly upgrading their 2003, 37 foot Cruisers) loaned us some nice bikes and we rode around perimeter of the island. Mackinac Island is truly beautiful, with gorgeous turquoise water, white pebble beaches, and lushly forested hills. There are no cars, so you never hear the sound of an engine, which is a wonderful thing.
Before we leave for Cheboygan, MI, a new boat pulls into the slip next to us. The woman on board tells the harbor master what horrendous sea’s they had experienced coming from Petoskey and how relieved they were to be in safe harbor! In Mackinac Harbor, it is completely sunny, quiet and beautiful, and seems hard to believe that a few minutes before they were stressing about the conditions. We told them of our surprise high seas the last two days. They, like us, had checked the weather, wind and wave reports, and all said 2 foot seas, so they had been quite surprised by the difficult passage and five foot seas. Obviously checking the conditions isn’t enough! One must also calculate wind speed and direction along with the topography of the lake’s floor and the dispersion pattern of the water, or just let yourself be surprised.
Luckily, we had a nice cruise to Cheboygan where we pulled into a plain little harbor. All the harbors on this trip so far have been beyond lovely and picturesque in charming, idyllic towns, but Cheboygan, while not bad, is just plain. We walked ½ mile down cracked sidewalks to downtown looking for a nice place to have lunch as it was already 2:00 and John hadn’t eaten yet. The only decent looking place was Mulligan’s Irish Sports Bar, so we ate there and headed back to the boat where John promptly blew up the little red raft he had purchased in Petoskey, hopped in the water and began cleaning the boat. I chatted with neighbors and handed cleaning supplies down to him now and again. Later we took in an evening movie “We are the Millers” (which was very silly and bawdy, but we laughed pretty hard.) Afterwards we went back to the only decent restaurant in town, Mulligan’s, for dinner. On our walk home, the streets were completely empty except for several cute little black bats flashing about eating tiny insects.
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