Sunday July 11, 2021.
Temp: 71 /61, Humidity: 81/95%, Top Wind: NE9 mph, Precip: RAIN!, Miles Traveled: 47
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I was not already awake when the alarm went off this morning, so when it sounded, I had no idea where I was or why that dadgum noise was waking me up. Oh! I remember now. We want to try to outrun the rain on our voyage to Erie Pennsylvania today. PENNSYLVANIA! We’ve been to Philadelphia by car, but Island Girl has never stepped foot or keel in the state. 😉After five weeks, we will finally be moving out of New York! New York is a really big state, and we’ve gone up and across the widest part! The pink line is what we’ve done on Island Girl.
So yes – we got up and were peeling ourselves away from our spot at 6:00 this morning. Before we were very far, we saw that we had six other looper boats trailing us. It was a beautiful morning, but there was rain coming for the whole afternoon. 😩We had at least five hours of travel, so we were hoping we could get to Erie before too much downpour.
It was nice and calm inside the breakwater, and there was a white swan tootling around amongst the Canadian geese. Maybe he thought he was the Ugly Duckling? I thought he was pretty.
This is the Dunkirk lighthouse. It would have been interesting to ride our bikes out there, but we just didn’t have time.
AHHH! Would you look at this?! Lake Erie never looked so good!
Ta-DA! Check it out! Welcome to Pennsylvania!
We had a bit of a bug infestation last night. At least they’re all dead.
We had cloud cover all day, but no rain all morning! It was a nice peaceful comfortable cruise this morning.
We kept watching this all around us. It didn’t look like we were going to get the lightning, and if luck would hold, we might stay in this little open spot? Wouldn’t that be nice? Didn’t happen. 💦 (Yea – Google thought we were on land for a minute…. we weren’t really.)
We were just coming to the channel entrance into Presque Isle Bay and we could see big dredges ahead of us. We had a “Homeland Security” boat do a zip around us a little while ago, but they left us alone. I suppose they can see that we’re a US boat by our AIS signal. As we were coming into this channel, we followed a Coast Guard boat in.
There were actually three dredge barges in the channel, but there was plenty of water even outside the channel for us, so we didn’t have to get too close.
There’s a little lighthouse here at the entry. We had about five go-fast boats come up behind us, so I guess either the fishermen were done for the day, or it was going to get stormy? It did start to rain, but it wasn’t windy at all.
Inside the bay was nice and calm, and we made our way to the inner harbor at Erie.
We called on the radio and got our slip assignment, so I went out on the bow to try to spy A-12. We finally found it and got ourselves backed in and secured while light rain fell. Captain did a beautious job. It’s been a long time since we’ve backed into a slip! There wasn’t any help on the docks here, but we’re kind of used to that after the Erie Canal. Right behind us came another five or six Looper boats, so we helped a couple of them in that were next to us. This picture is from the marina office looking out – Island Girl is on the right.
It rained ALLLLLL afternoon. Since it was way too soggy to try to go exploring, I took advantage of the marina having a laundry room, and we just lazed around. We were expecting a call from some new local friends, Ed & Judy, who we met in St Michaels. They came to the “Looper Crawl” back in May and really loved our boat. They loved it so much that they actually found one and put an offer on it! Anyway, we were looking forward to seeing them, and they came and picked us up around 6:00, and took us to dinner at their Erie Yacht Club. We drove through some absolutely beautiful neighborhoods in the pouring down rain. I tried to take a few pictures through the car window. These two homes looked like they were getting some work done.
This one was stunning!
And this?! Wow!
This shot was all about the turkey on the left. There was a gang of them that had just crossed the road. 🤨
Another nice place. We also drove through town and out on the pier by the marina. It looked like a pretty neat town with a lot to see. Stupid rain.
This is me & Judy after a delicious and fun dinner. The sun even came out!
Their yacht club is really large with a very large marina for a lot of boats. It was a ways out of town, and we don’t have a reciprocating yacht club membership, so we did not stay here.
With all this rain, it’s really putting a damper on our explorations! We want to move along the lake if the wind and waves will allow it, because we could get stuck somewhere for several days. We can travel in rain, but not in windy-wavey stuff. Tomorrow looks like it will be pretty reasonable, but there are some windy days in the forecast for later this week. We decided to move along to the next stop. Cleveland is just two days travel from here, and we may get stuck there for a few days. Tomorrow won’t be as calm as the last couple of days on the water, but we’re hoping it won’t be bad. 🤞