Boblo Island, On August 12, 2016

It was a nice quiet morning with little breeze so I knew we would have no issue leaving. We planned to catch the first bridge at 8:00. At 7:25 I saw a sailboat going to the bridge. I knew he would be surprised. He finally called the marina and found out that the first bridge was at 8:00.

I was glad he was there because they always open the 8:00 bridge late. The tender does not start until 8:00 I guess. So as often as that sailboat called to request a 8:00 opening, he did not answer. When he finally did, at 8:05, he was like, "So what do you want?" Kerry thought I should tell him he was rude, but the picture in my mind of the bridge closing on Annie overruled the Princess.

There was a 90% chance of a thunderstorm by 2:00 according to the weather channel. The GPS said we would get there at 2:00 so I figured this could be interesting. As luck would have it, we had a 15 knot breeze on the nose. It was going against the current so we had some choppy waves. They were no problem except that they slowed us down. In Lake St. Clair we were motoring in the 8's verses the 11's in the Detroit River. Lots of water came over Annie's bow.

Oh yea, and one other problem. Apparently we did not have the front window closed tightly. Because when I went to put on my shirt at the marina it was soaked - and so were all the bed clothes. Guess which Princess was not happy. Not sure where we are sleeping tonight.

It was a fast trip today though. We arrived at 2:00, so we did 58.6 miles in 6 hours, about a 10.0 knot average. That puts us at 1106 nautical miles for the trip so far. Jim K was able to follow our progress on AIS on the web. We traveled the length of the St Clair River, Lake St Clair and the Detroit river. We can see Lake Erie from the marina at Boblo. I think it will be another 60 miles to Vermilion on Sunday. So far a good weather day is forecast. The promised storms have not arrived by 5:00. No complaints from me. Below is one of the more interesting boats we passed today.

When we arrived it was pretty breezy. No one from the marina was here to help or show us where our dock was, but some nice permanent dockers got on the radio and helped us in. The marina assigned us to a dock which was way to small and also difficult to get into. My helpers said the workers here know nothing about boats and have no clue how to assign slips. So, with their help, we backed out of that dock and took one to our liking. The marina staff did not care. Kerry called us into Canada Customs with no problem at all. Peter Orro will be glad to know they now have cleats on the docks. When we arrived here on our outbound trip they did not. Peter arrived first and was not pleased to discover this. When we arrived he was here to help us. Kerry had to wash off bird droppings when we were finally tied up.

I heard from Jims Karpinski and Schulz and Kip that my blog was not updated. Yet I did do the daily posts. It turns out that I made the last 2 days posts on last year's blog. It took me quite a while to figure out what I had done, but it's fixed now.

A few little showers came by at cocktail time. We were going to grill Italian sausages, but decided to do the Boblo Restaurant for their perch special, which was very good. Our bed is drying out so it appears we will be able to sleep in the Captain's Quarters tonight!