This spring (2008) my wife and I decided to move our boat from Pike’s Bay Marina on Lake Superior to Menominee Marina in Menominee, MI on Lake Michigan.  Menominee is on the West coast of Green Bay right across the Menominee River from Marinette, WI.

The trip entails sailing from Pike’s Bay up the south shore of Lake Superior, through the Keweenaw Passage, across to Whitefish Bay and through the locks at Sault Ste. Marie, MI.  At that point, the St. Mary’s river takes you to Lake Huron. We would then take a hard right and go through the Straits of Mackinaw and into northern Lake Michigan.  We would enter Green Bay between St. Martin and Rock Islands and then about half way down the bay to Menominee.  The total trip comes to about 500 miles.

Because of time constraints, I wanted to make the trip in as short a time as possible and try to take advantage of a long holiday weekend so as to have as little impact on crew vacation time as possible.  I chose the Memorial Day weekend to make the trip.  Departure on the Thursday before the weekend and, hopefully, arrive on Memorial Day.  This would require averaging about 5-5 ½ knots for the trip, a comfortable cruising speed for my 1977 Pearson 323.  In order to keep the target speed, I expected that we would motor sail quite a lot.  All of the crew, however, is aware that the unexpected could lengthen the time accordingly.

I wanted a crew of six people so as to have plenty of help but not overcrowd the boat.  The watches would consist of three people each.  This made watch planning much easier than smaller watch crews, but requires us to stand 4 hour watches.  The Weems and Plath ship’s clock is perfect for use as a watch timing device as it chimes “ships bells” and 8 bells would signal a watch change.  The watches are set up so the crews would rotate the nights on which they would draw two night watches (10:pm to Midnight and 4:am to 8:am).  This necessitated having each crew draw a back to back day watch every other day.  I didn’t think this would be a problem since both crews would be “on duty” during the day anyway.

Being a computer nerd, I made extensive use of Microsoft Excel and my programming skills to do the planning and scheduling.  The boat has a Raymarine C-80 chart plotter with GPS and Radar.  I used the Raymarine planning software that is compatible with the Navionics map chip and set up all of the waypoints for the trip on my computer.  These were then downloaded to an Excel worksheet for each of the six legs of the trip.  There were an additional two legs that could be used if we needed to “bail out” for weather.  I used a lot of waypoints for the channel and river parts of the trip in case we encountered severe fog.  All waypoints are set well away from any buoys or land masses that they marked.  Too many times people have set a buoy as a waypoint and then their accurate GPS guidance unerringly guides them right into the mark – literally.  The Excel workbook also contains sheets for the crew schedule, all of the individual waypoints (with links to the nearest NDBC Weather stations), the weather stations (with the dial code for getting the weather via cell phone) and a logbook for entering hourly position data for use in dead reckoning in case all of the fancy toys break.  Finally, the waypoints were loaded from the chip to the C-80.  This was much easier than entering some 60+ waypoints manually.

Since many of the crew also have their own handheld GPS I decided to provide them with all of the waypoints for the trip.  That way we will have multiple backups.  There is a shareware program called EasyGPS that will “talk” to virtually all of the handheld GPS units on the market using the popular GPX standard.  I wrote routines into the Excel workbook that would export the necessary files for uploading into the handheld GPS units.

For paper navigation I have NOAA charts and the Richardson chart books for Lakes Superior and Michigan.  These are legal for navigation and somewhat easier to handle in the cockpit.  I also have my trusted copy of Bonnie Dahl’s “The Superior Way” an invaluable tool that takes us all the way to the end of the St. Mary’s River.  We have at least two full sets of plotting tools aboard the boat and the pertinent sections of Coast Pilot.

I have always wanted to learn celestial navigation and what better way to do it than for real, out on the water, with no land in sight.  One of the crew has a WWII British made sextant that his father used during the war to circumnavigate in a US Navy ship.  I have a Davis Mark 25 sextant.  I also have the “Navigator” software that will “cheat” and do all of the calculations for you.  It includes the sight tables and I printed them out for the days we were on the trip.  It has a feature that will show you a graphical view of the sky at any day/time.  This way we could do the work manually and then check it with the program to see how we did.  William F. Buckley’s (may he rest in peace) excellent DVD on the subject, “Celestial Navigation Simplified”  is a must for someone new to celestial navigation – he takes all of the mystery out of it in his own delightful way.  Many of us have studied Bowditch and we will have a couple of other books on board also.

The laptop on the boat will have all of the computer stuff loaded on it and can also play DVD’s.  It has Wi-Fi capability and my cell phone will act as a wireless modem if we are in cell phone coverage.

We will have a small generator on board in case all of this stuff runs the batteries down, but I expect to only use the laptop for very short periods unless we are motoring.  All of the electronic data will be printed out prior to departure.

We have a Walker Bay 10RID for a dinghy, on davits that will be well out of reach of waves.  If need be, we can either tow the dinghy or haul it aboard and lash it down on the foredeck.  We will have at least two immersion suits so, in the unlikely event of the boat sinking out from under us, two will have to go in the water and four in the dinghy.  We are not taking a motor for the dinghy, just oars.  I have a ditch bag which will contain a waterproof handheld VHF radio, flares and a handheld GPS.  We have an EPIRB rented from BoatUS.

We also have a new addition that could prove valuable and is also a lot of fun.  The SPOT Messenger is a small, waterproof, handheld device that transmits your position every 10 minutes using the GEOS satellite system and Google Maps.  It also has the capability of sending “I’m OK” and “9-1-1” messages on demand.  These go to selected email addresses and cell phones and, in the case of the emergency 9-1-1 message, the GEOS Search and Rescue system.  The fun part is that I have set up a shared web page through the SPOT system that allows anyone to watch our progress, real time on Google Maps.  This way friends and relatives can just click on a link and see where we are at any time day or night.

The diesel burns approximately ½ gallon of fuel per hour at a reasonable 5-6 knots.  This speed is easy on the engine and burns through the miles.  We will top off the tanks at each of two or three planned stops and we will also carry two 5 gallon jerry cans of fuel lashed to the deck.  This will theoretically give us over 300 miles of motoring without refilling any tanks. 

We have the standard sail plan for the P-323, a main and 135 genoa.  I am bringing along our symmetrical spinnaker and pole since we have plenty of crew to handle it and it could come in handy. 

I plan to keep a Captain’s Log of the trip as it unfolds.  Each night I will sit down at the laptop and record my thoughts – check back for the narrative.