We’ve holed up in Northport before. The marina has a good rate, the grocery and library are close by, and so are pastries.
With wifi, we’ve been able to stream our favorite YouTube channels, watch the World Cup final, and watch some episodes of British crime dramas.
When the weather is decent, we take care of the boat – cleaning, maintenance and repairs. We also like to get out to walk for three or four miles.
We check the weather everyday. Both for the forecast locally, and looking at sailing weather towards the weekend. We will leave Northport on Thursday. We have options, but it looks like we will have wind to take us to Beaver Island. We would be on a broad reach, with following seas, and Reflection is very happy with that.
Our pattern has been to take a marina slip, or anchor, for a couple of nights any day that we’ve sailed between six to eight hours. Our slip is reserved at Beaver Island for Thursday and Friday nights.
Saturday’s forecast is fifteen to twenty knots from the SW until we get to the Straits. Again, that’s a broad reach, and that is ideal. We have a slip reserved in St. Ignace for Saturday and Sunday.
From there, we should be able to get to Drummond Island, and thence to Thessalon, Ontario.
Our sailing weather app has several models for forecasting, and we can see all of them at once. If they are pretty much the same, we can assume that the forecast will be close to reality. If they are divergent, then it’ll be mostly wrong. For our sails on Thursday they are close together, so as reliable as any guess about the weather can be. Saturday is a different story as the models don’t agree and we could have a lot of wind. Reef early and often.
We have said to ourselves that we would take a slip when we need to and when we want to. As of today, we have been out for seven weeks (49 days), and we have been in a slip for 23. Some of that has been because of weather, too windy or too hot or too smoky. We have air conditioning on Reflection, but it requires shore power that is only available in a slip. So when it got very hot or very smoky, we took a slip.
We’ll be out for another ten weeks or so, and I hope for less heat and less smoke.