Our anticipated 10:00 start ended up a 10:35 start for a variety of reasons. But with a wonderful send off from dockmates Claire and Kathy and my P.E.O. sister Rhonda from Lafayette who has a cottage in Holland ( and who brought donuts and other pastries -thank you, Rhonda!) we left our slip and headed south.

If you ever need a good shipyard and marina on the east side of Lake Michigan, this is the place to go. They treated us so well and the service dept. went above and beyond on many occasions for us. Thank you Thom, Mike, Jake, Matt, and all the others who helped us.

Jake, who runs the parts dept. and ship store, and who patiently answered my  questions  almost every day.

A last look at our slip with Claire, Kathy, and Rhonda waving goodbye to us.

Just after we pulled out of our slip

Passing the Holland lighthouse, Big Red , one last time

Soon after getting out into Lake Michigan we hit some intermittent big waves. I was headed below to look for something and realized our dinghy was no longer on the lift and the lift was no longer where it was supposed to be. Rich was eventually able to get the dinghy loose and tied to the side of the boat and we went more slowly than planned into Saugatuck. The river current was really strong and we had to go against the current to get into a slip -yet another adventure!  (Fortunately, or unfortunately, I have no photos of this part of our day).

Rich was eventually able to get the lift working properly and the man who installed the lift came down from Holland to make sure it was okay. We got the dinghy back on the lift and securely fastened down, but unfortunately the hull now has a hole in it. It’s a double hull so it still floats if we had to use it in an emergency. The installer from Holland has a good friend in Chicago who can repair the hole, so it ended up  better than we had hoped for.

By the time we got the dinghy issue resolved and i had cleaned up the inside of the boat it was time to get ready for dinner. Our good friends Mickie and Tom, who have a slip just a few down from where we are, joined us for dinner at one of our favorite restaurants in Saugatuck. It turned out to be a great birthday!

Tomorrow we head to St. Joseph MI, a trip of 44miles.

 

 

 

Tomorrow we officially begin the Great Loop, so I thought this would be a good time to have an “open house” and give you a tour of the inside of our boat. This will be our home sweet home for the foreseeable future.

These are the steps from the middle outside deck leading into the main salon. The doorway to the right of the steps leads to the master cabin which is at the rear of the boat. Do you see the TV on a ceiling mount?

There are three recliners to the left as you come down the steps. The galley ( kitchen) is beyond the recliners. I have a two door fridge/freezer in the galley that holds a surprising amount of food and drinks – we won’t starve or die of dehydration. The door to the right of the fridge goes into the forward/guest cabin.

To the right as you come down the steps is a curved settee with a dining table.

And under the cushions of the settee is my pantry!

We replaced the original 3 burner ceramic cooktop with a two burner induction cooktop. I had tried to boil water for pasta on the old burners and after 45 minutes it still wasn’t even at a simmer. I knew I couldn’t spend a year with a wimpy cooktop so out it came and the induction one went in. Now I can get a pan of water to boil in two minutes!

      

There are lots of hidden storage places on our boat. For example, under the rug in the galley is access to our wine cellar and under that, an access panel to that storage space where I put all those paper towels.

The left side of the guest cabin

The guest head (bathroom). There’s a glass enclosed shower that is being used as storage space for gallon jugs of water and soda. I guess I’ll have to find a space for all of that if we ever have guests who want to use the shower.

The master cabin. The sliders in the upper right corner of the picture open on to the back deck (Rich says what I call the back deck is actually the cockpit, which makes no sense to me. I think a cockpit is at the front, like the cockpit in a plane. Who do you agree with?)

From left to right – bookshelf in a space that used to house an old TV ( note another ceiling mounted TV – it unlatches and the TV flips down) with a cupboard underneath for a clothes hamper, toilet, sink, and separate shower.

As you can see, life isn’t too bad on our boat!

We had decided yesterday that we needed to pump out our holding tank (for non-boaters, think 55 gallon storage tank for everything that comes through the toilets -not a pretty thought-and a really shitty job for the dock hand who runs the pump), so at 9:30 this morning we headed over to the fuel dock where pump out is located. Fortunately there were no other boats there so it was quick and easy. Trying to get back into our slip wasn’t so easy. The wind and current were working against us so it took some maneuvering and a helping hand from a friend a few slips over to get us tied up – thank you Claire!

When we hooked up shore power again we discovered the A/C was shutting down. The rest of the morning was spent trying to figure out what was wrong. Fortunately once Rich cleaned out strainers and blew gunk out of the hoses it started working again.

And then the rain started. It poured buckets and buckets and more buckets – and then we discovered a leak above the settee. Water coming inside a boat is not a good thing. And it wasn’t even noon yet! We were afraid to think of what the rest of the day was going to be like.

The lower window on the left is where the leak was.

Luckily the rest of the day turned out to be much better. The rain stopped so no more leaks, the sun came out, and our daughter Elizabeth and grandkids Izzy and Alex arrived to spend the weekend with us.

After 5 hours in the car, the kids were ready to run off some energy, so I took them to the marina playground. Next to the playground was a giant sailboat that had raced in this year’s Chicago to Mackinac race. Izzy is 5’2”, so you can get a good idea of how big this boat is.

Then it was time for the weekly Saturday Z dock happy hour. We were surprised to find they had a cake for us! We had no idea that Z dock was so friendly and welcoming when we selected a slip on it last winter, but we feel very lucky to have become a part of it. Thank you to all the Z dockers out there for making our summer so much fun!

Elizabeth and her kids have a tradition that whenever they’re in Michigan they have to have ice cream every night. So after dinner it was off to Captain Sundae.

a Tommy Turtle Sunday for Elizabeth

mint chocolate chip for Alex

And candy play dough for Izzy ( blue moon ice cream with bits of red, yellow, and green cookie dough)

By 9:30 we were all ready to call it a night!

 

People who do the Loop are called Loopers and we’ve been patiently waiting all summer to meet some. One boat arrived at the beginning of the week and stayed a couple of nights waiting for the weather to clear. We visited with them briefly and then they were gone. They said there were many boats behind them – and yesterday some of them arrived!

Two Looper boats are on our dock and at least three other boats are on other docks in our marina. We joined them for docktails yesterday ( that’s what Loopers call happy hour) and enjoyed hearing about their trips. There were boaters from OH, VT, FL, CT, and MD – and boats of all shapes and sizes. It made us even more anxious to get this adventure started!

I realized as I got ready to post something tonight that I took no pictures of docktails nor did I get any pictures of anything we’ve been doing for the past two days. I need to work on my photography skills 😊

I’ll end with a beautiful sunset I captured a couple of days ago –

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!