NOAA the weather station often gets the weather right, but today they needed to open their office window and let their computer animated voice look outside. They predicted light winds and a calm lake for today August 5. Instead we woke to a loud roar from the Lake and white caps rolling out on Thunder Bay. All day long they kept saying the winds were only 5-10 knots out of the southeast. The huge flag at the marina was standing straight out and the wind was blowing 20-25 knots out of the southeast. It was a very easy decision to stay in port today. We decided it was a good day to try out our new bicycles. Our bikes are 20" (yes 20") but the neat thing is they fold up. The seat and handlebars extend and they fold in half. The fit very nicely when folded, in a hatch in the cockpit (the aft part of the boat). Allison and Connor made a grocery run then Grandpa got on one of the bikes and Connor borrowed a Marina bike which he calls an old folks bike. So far most of the Marinas have courtesy bikes which you can borrow. We took a tour of Alpena and rode out on the breakwall which is 1/2 mile long. The Lake was still roaring!
Today Monday August 6th, we awoke to limp Flag. Winds were predicted to be from the North shifting to the NW at 10 knots. Seeing the limp flag was reassuring but with wind from the North we were in for a lumpy ride. 10.8 mph was the speed today and at times the ride was a little lumpy and we encountered a lot of 4' waves but we were taking them mostly on our bow. Total distance traveled today was 62 miles to Rogers City. Our dinghy davit support cables apparently came loose sometime in the last few miles traveled, which allowed our dinghy to drop in the water. The davit arms kept the dinghy from breaking loose but the dinghy was partially full of water so we got out our portable bilge pump to empty the water. Out the bikes came and Connor, on an old folks bike, and Allison and I on the 20" er's were off to the hardware store to find a couple of turnbuckles to repair the dinghy support cables. The downtown hardware store visit was not productive so we rode a mile to the outskirts of town to the Ace hardware. They didn't have exactly what we wanted as if we had visited the Decatur True Value but it will get us back on the road again.
We took on 149 gallons of fuel. Our FloScan gauges said we used 153 gallons so we will tweak them slightly but all in all they are amazingly accurate. For the techies amongst us, there are two flow meters hooked to each engine. One measures the fuel sent to the engine, while the other measures the unburned fuel returned to the fuel tank. The computer calculates the difference and shows a digital readout of the gals/hr burned for each engine. The gauge also shows the rpms digitally and is amazingly accurate. The system is also hooked to the gps which feeds the computer the boat speed so the Floscan calculates and shows the mpg instantaneusly.
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