When you live on a boat you pay more attention to the weather. Not only do you have to make sure windows (ports and hatches in boat lingo), doors, and canvas are closed and zipped up if it looks like rain, but you also have to make sure the boat and dinghy are securely tied up and that there is nothing loose on the deck that can go flying off if/when the wind starts blowing.

if you intend to leave the slip, you look at weather reports, weather radar, marine forecasts, and anything else that might give you an idea of conditions on the water. And then you pray that conditions don’t change for the worse while you’re out.

The last few days have brought a variety of weather conditions that have kept many people in ports longer than anticipated. And today was no exception. It started off warm and sultry with small craft advisories, then clouded up, became even more windy, rained, cleared just a bit at sunset, then the skies opened up again. Radar looks like it’s going to rain all night long.☹️

Looking off the port (left)side of the boat tonight it looked very threatening.

And then I turned around and this was the view off the starboard (right) side.

By the way, do you know how to remember that port is the left side? Just ask “Is there any port left?”. Probably doesn’t work well if you’re a kid or don’t drink adult beverages 😀

So we woke up this morning to dense fog which we expected to burn off by noon. Wrong! By 3ish it was better, but still a bit hazy. Our neighbors tried to go out sailing about 1, but turned around in the channel because they couldn’t even see the lighthouse that sits right there! A transient boat came down from Muskegon and said they almost ended up on the beach because they couldn’t see the channel opening – scary!

9:15 a.m. – shots from our back deck

3:15 p.m., same view as the 9:15 shots

Sunset was at 8:26, but the sky was already dark, with lightning off to the west.  And then by 10:30 the wind kicked up. I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

Our last night in Lafayette. Tomorrow we head to Bloomington for a night with Dan and family. We will head to MI Friday morning and by Sunday we will be without a car and the reality of looping will be real!

Enjoying one last night by the fire pit

It was a cigar kind of night for Rich

And then it was time to go in

Good night Lafayette.

We’ve spent the last week trying to get everything purchased (and find places for!) everything that we need for our trip. It’s amazing how much stuff we’ve crammed into every little open spot we could find. Who would have thought that you could fit 13 rolls of paper towels, 10 boxes of Kleenex, and 2 12-packs of diet cola under the floorboards in the galley??

And of course we had to find room for Pringles! Happy hours and trips to beaches require Pringles 😀

We also got boat cards to hand out to family, friends, and people we meet along the way. I guess we can’t back out now since I have a blog and we have boat cards.

When we bought our boat it was named Nauti Minky, not a name we wanted to keep. But what should we rename it?

We discovered that picking out a name for a boat is harder than naming a child. We wanted the name to be easy to pronounce and spell so we could be easily identified by bridge tenders, lock masters, and other boats. And we didn’t want cutesy, punny names, although there were some good ones out there. We didn’t want anything that revealed that we’re little old retired people, not did we want anything that revealed what our professions had been. (The last thing we want is to find someone sitting on our back deck waiting for us to return so Rich could diagnose someone’s illness or write a prescription.) And I didn’t want the boat named after me. So what to name her?

The boat make is Meridian. Since the prime Meridian is how you measure distance from a starting point (the prime Meridian) and our lives will be measured from this point we decided Prime Meridian was an appropriate name. (There were a number of names I vowed I would not set foot on the boat if it had that name 😄).

So Prime Meridian it is!

Our boat has a back deck that is facing the entrance to the channel that goes between Lake Macatawa (where our marina is) and Lake Michigan. We see boats of all different kinds and sizes, from small sailboats and powerboats to big barges and cargo vessels – there’s always something interesting to see!