8/24/18 Friday: This is one of the weather apps we’ve been using while on Lake Michigan. It is called Windy, and it has four different forecast models, so you can see what the they all think is coming. This is the wind forecast for the next few days. Gray is awesome- under 8mph: blue is ok -up to 10mph: green is not happy- up to 20mph: and yellow/orange is no-way-Jose: over 20mph. Of course, the gray tends to appear from 0:00 to 6:00am. And we don’t go out in the dark. How is that helpful?!
It also shows predicted wave and swell heights along with direction. When you have wind, waves, and swells all coming from different directions, it is NOT comfortable! We really don’t want to go out in purple waves on the chart. So Sunday is our only chance in the next five days to travel. I think we might go a really long ways on Sunday.
Another good one is the NOAA site. It has wind and wave graphics for every three hours that you can scroll through. We only want to go if everything is a nice dark blue. Right now, there’s some really big dark green waves northwest of us, which according to the chart is 9 foot waves!! Holy capsize, Batman!
And www.marine.weather.gov. adds another look. In my opinion, 3 no’s on this page = NO GO! Small craft advisory, waves 4-6 feet, waves 5-7 feet. No way Jose.
All of these things say we aren’t going anywhere until Sunday. And then, where ever we are, we’ll be there until at least Wednesday. Saturday, Monday & Tuesday are bad. We are considering making a long run: 112+ miles – all the way down to Michigan City, Indiana. We have reservations there for a week starting on Wednesday, at just $40/night. We could probably add on some nights. We plan to leave Island Girl there for four nights over Labor Day weekend while we drive down to Indianapolis for the NHRA Drag Races. I have mentioned that Kenny is a Motörhead, right? He loves the races, and I love being with him in his zone, so we always have fun at the drags. As a matter of fact, we first met at the drag races…. 44 years ago! In the last couple of years, we’ve enjoyed seeing races at various new places. In addition to Pacific Raceway in Kent WA, we’ve been to the Gatornationals in Gainesville FL, and Thunder Valley in Bristol TN. Now we’ll add the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis to the collection of venues visited.
But – back to our schedule. It is disappointing to go so far in one day. We will miss some great stops, such as Grand Haven, Saugatuck, Holland, South Haven, and St Joseph. That’s a bummer. The problem is that not all these towns have rental cars or great marinas to leave the boat, so our choices are limited. But we do have a window that can move us down the lake. Then also to consider if we stayed here, there is no guarantee that the weather after Labor Day will be good either. Chances are that it will be, and we could leave the boat up here and continue on after Labor Day from here. But I think we’ll go ahead and move on. Michigan City puts us within 40 miles of Chicago – just one good weather day needed to get off of Lake Michigan and on our way down the rivers into a whole new set of challenges and places to experience. If you want to see where we are going after Chicago, look at my main menu at the Page called “Great Loop:”. It will show you a map.
Today we stayed on the boat and I was in my sweats all day! Tom from Sum Escape stopped by to say hello, and it was really great to see him! We missed Julie. She was busy getting ready for a big birthday party tomorrow for Tom’s mom who is somewhere in her 90’s. This evening there was a free concert in the park, but it was rainy and drizzly. We could hear jazz music every now & then, but it was just too wet to go out and explore. So we watched movies. We only get 3 channels on the TV, so we didn’t have much to choose from, and there were some really weird ones! We’ll check the weather again tomorrow, and make a plan. It would be nice to only go half way, like 55 miles? Wednesday could shape up for another travel day, and that would work perfect… but it’s looking more like Thursday will be the good one … which would be later than we want for all of the other stuff we have lined up. We’ll see!