Day 115- On to OHIO!

Monday July 12, 2021.
Temp: 76 /66, Humidity: 83/98%, Top Wind: E16 mph, Precip: RAIN!, Miles Traveled: 56

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I postponed our get up and outta here a little bit this morning, waiting for the lake to calm down a bit. The forecast had waves over night, but calming as the day goes on, so I thought we’d give them a bit. We were nice and calm in the marina, inside the bay. Our friends on Hallelujah! left early and sent a text that it was rough on the nose going out the channel, but once turned and going west it was a little more comfortable. Well – we can’t wait all day, so we pulled our lines and hit the road at about 7:45.

Another cloudy-high-chance-of-rain kind of day. Really bummed that we didn’t get to explore Erie PA!

As we went out the channel, I thought I heard the National Anthem! Sure enough…. the Coast Guard station was raising the flag at 0800.

We were in the middle of quite the boat parade leaving Erie. And yes… once we got out of the channel, there were big rollers coming straight at us. There were waves crashing on the shore, and if you had a surf board, you would have had a great ride. It wasn’t quite so much fun in Island Girl, as her nose dove down and then heaved back up. Fortunately that only happened a few times with the random really big roller. Most of it was up and down and annoying, with just an occassional dive. If we’d had to face going into this all day, we would have turned around and gone back inside. But since we were going to turn and go with the waves, we stuck it out.

We had a whole bunch of hitch-hikers with us. The bugs were awful! How in the world do they just show up when we’re several miles off shore?! Most were midge type bugs, which look like a mosquito but thankfully don’t bite. And there were other varieties as well, just to make it interesting. I took our tennis-raquet electric swatter-zapper and zapped a zillion. Then we fired up the thermocell which really did help keep them out. We were going with the wind, so we had little to no breeze at all. At least they were mostly out in the back on the hard top and down in the cockpit. Finally, Kenny got out the flying insect killer and sprayed all over the back of the boat, and we had a nice solid layer of dead bugs everywhere. 🥴

Here is the kind of stuff that was following us. Waves. We were getting so fed up with bugs and the still air, that we finally decided to create some breeze for ourselves and go fast for awhile. That was a real struggle for the Girl, and the Captain didn’t like the way she behaved. Something about these waves from behind us, she just wouldn’t get up on top and stay up. She hated it! So after struggling for about 20 minutes, we went back down to our normal cruise speed.

Here is where we said good-bye to Pennsylvania, and hello to Ohio. Neither of us have ever been anywhere in Ohio, so this would be all new territory for us. You can see our yellow go-fast lines and our current speed of 20.1mph. And you can see that we went fast, stopped, then tried it again. We thought maybe we were dragging something the way she was being such a dog about it, so Captain stopped and put her in reverse to try to shake off weeds from the rudders or something? But it didn’t help. She just wasn’t happy going fast today.

We finally arrived at Geneva On The Lake and the Geneva marina at about 1:15. Whew! And of course, it started to rain. We didn’t have any rain all morning until now. 🤷‍♀️

We tootled in and got turned around and lined up on the wall right in front of Hallelujah! And it was raining. We were soaked, and it wasn’t going to let up for awhile.

Check out the dead zone! Kenny decided that he was already wet, so he got out the hose and squirter, and power rinsed everything down. Fortunately dead bugs sink, or there would have been an awful sheen of dead bugs all around us!

Miraculously, the sky cleared for a little while around 3:30, so I went out on an adventure. It’s about a mile walk into ‘town’ from here, so I tootled out on the path. This is a big park that is elevated above the boat basin, which is behind me as I took this picture.

Oh! There it is! Hallelujah! is that big pretty Carver, and she makes Island Girl look so little. 😉

Here is the trail that leads to town.

Check these spikey buggers out! I didn’t know that they flowered, but there was little tiny pink flowers starting to bloom on all of the spikes.

The trail took me past The Lodge at Geveva-on-the Lake. It was pretty and had both an indoor pool in that pavillion on the left, and a big outdoor pool as well. There were lots of kids and families having a great time there!

The trail ended right up there by the yellow arrow ➡️ sign, but I back tracked down the road just a bit to capture this welcome sign. I’d read that Geneva-on-the-Lake (GOTL) is and has been, quite a resorty vacation spot, and that the town still has the original 1950-60’s vibe.

Oooh – check these beauties out!

I walked as far as an amusement center, that had mini golf, a zip line, and all kinds of things to do. I turned around and went back home, thinking we needed to both ride our bikes into town for dinner tonight.

The trail that I was on was just one of many in the area. The marina is actually within the State Park. We never even went around to the marina office or anything, so we don’t even really know what was here!

When I got back from my walk, I was drippin wet. Well no wonder! Look at that humidity! That’s way higher on the scale than ‘oppresive’.

And then it rained again. For about two more hours. I was getting nervous that the rain wasn’t going to stop and that we wouldn’t even make it to town. And then we’d have to have peanut butter and jelly samiches for dinner. BUT! It stopped! Woo-hooo! So we got the bikes out and went for a peddle. We’ve had the bikes in easy access mode ever since Fairport on the Erie Canal. One of them has been living inside the boat, and the other one has been covered up in the cockpit.
We peddled into town and found Mary’s Kitchen. Kenny found it on-line and saw that they were all about home cooking, which sounded good.

They close at 8:00, and it was 7:30 when we arrived, so we were able to have dinner. They serve breakfast all day, so Captain had chicken-fried-steak, and I had a chicken salad samich on a croissant. Both were tasty, and the place was just down-home cute, with the sweetest young ladies for servers.

After dinner we rode through town to scope it out. There were a whole bunch of burger joints, ice cream, arcades, bars and so on. There was one place with a huge outdoor area with a big stage and a guy playing music. But with it being Monday and a soggy wet evening, I only saw a few people at the dozens of picnic tables.

Here’s a sample of one of the strips of eating joints.

Back to the boat in time for sunset, and it was beautiful.

I even captured a piece of a rainbow!

One of the other loopers took this sunset picture of all of us lined up on the wall. We didn’t have much opportunity to visit with anybody here due to the crummy weather, so hopefully we’ll meet them along the way as we travel along. Most of us came from Erie today, but we didn’t meet them there either, due to the rain keeping everybody inside.

Tomorrow looks like it will be a better day on the water. We are traveling along the southern shore of Lake Erie, and we’ll be going into Cleveland tomorrow. The wind is going to shift around tonight and be coming from the south tomorrow. That should be good for us, since it’ll be coming over land, we’ll be in somewhat of the lee shelter, so the waves won’t have a lot of miles to build before they reach us! We’ll try to get up and going really early, since the wind is forecasted to keep clocking around and will be coming from the west by afternoon, which increases the 🌊 waves predictions. Never a dull moment!