Another day - Better results.

Sunday, June 14

We go up and our guests packed while Diana fixed pineapple pancakes for breakfast. We said our goodbyes and our guests headed to church, picked up the car at Winthrop Harbor and then Rick and Satoko had to drive back to White Bear.

As soon as they were gone Diana and I got underway and were out of our slip by 8:00. The sky was clear and the winds lighter. We redid the 13 miles plus the lock to Calumet Harbor. It was very busy, with a Sunday and nice weather there was a lot more pleasure boat traffic plus once we got above the lock we had to pull to the side and wait for commercial traffic. First there was a tug pulling a large lake barge (much larger than the river ones) with a tow boat through a bridge, I assume the tow had some sort of problem. Then a half mile later there was a lake freighter coming in off the lake.

Once we got thru the traffic it we got out into Calumet Harbor (full of fisherman) and it looked better than the day before. We headed for the southeast exit from the harbor and set an easterly heading for Michigan City, IN. The waves were about one foot from the side. The boat rolled a bit but not uncomfortably. Today even from the Calumet Harbor we could clearly see the Chicago skyline.

Last fall I ordered a new GPS receiver for my laptop mapping program, it was a different brand, and it never worked well. Over the winter I downloaded updates to the drivers and hoped it would cure the problems. It just created different problems. I then ordered a new one from Maptech the software vendor; I got it a couple of days ago and had no luck getting it to run. I had e-mailed support and last night at McD’s I had a reply, I was able finally to get it working after deleting the drivers and reinstalling slightly differently. It worked fine today and I am very relieved to again have a working chart plotter.

As we approached the IN. shore we could see the first of the Lake Michigan sand dunes, we will see many more as we go north.

After four hours (32 miles) of pleasant motoring we were entering the Washington Park Marina in MI City. It is a lovely municipal marina with about 600 slips (and free WiFi on the boat). We got settled in and relaxed a bit. Diana got two pictures one looking back out the main channel and the other looking across part of the marina at Memories.

After a pleasant day and a working GPS life is again good.