Bringing Zeke E Boy Home (Leg 2)

Feeling Refreshed

It’s amazing what good food and good sleep does for a person! I don’t even think I slept all that well, but I still felt a million times better. We woke up around 4:45 am CT with no alarm set, and started getting ready to leave Frankfort. Within 1 hour, we were ready to cast off and head out onto Lake Michigan again!

And More Prepared

We had a much better sense of the weather (at least so we thought – all weather forecasting is somewhat of a guess) and we had 2 – 3 contingency plans based on our previous land scouting trip. Now that we were further south on the lake, we knew which harbors we could bail into and which ones we wanted to avoid. Our goal was to get to Ludington by noon, so we would at least make it to Muskegon by the end of daylight – possibly even to Grand Haven. After all, we didn’t have any navigation lights so we needed to be docked before we lost sunlight.

More Fog

Luckily, the fog lifted in the harbor and it was clear enough to leave. We left Frankfort on Friday, May 27th at 5:45 am CT on a calm morning with ~6 knot North winds. Once we were out on the lake, we ran into fog, but it burned off by 1 or 2 pm. We had to dodge another freighter and heard the coast guard calls all day of a boat that made a Mayday call on Thursday near Milwaukee and then went down and couldn’t be found again, yikes! What were we thinking of being out in that weather? Thank you, Jesus, for protecting us from the storm!

You get what you need

While the day was pretty uneventful, we still had ~2 – 3 foot waves with gusts up to 20 knots. Kyle thought our whole delivery experience thus far was “terrible – not at all what I was expecting” (wanting – sometimes we don’t get what we want!). Because things were going well, we pushed it again past Muskegon to get to Grand Haven. This would allow us to have a better chance of making it home to New Buffalo on Saturday.

I’m the Captain

Fortunately, about an hour from the Grand Haven harbor entrance, Kyle took the boat off autopilot and started to get the feel of handling her in the waves. Again we had waves following from behind, which takes extra effort when navigating home into a harbor entrance. This was the best decision that Kyle made – it allowed him to truly steer Zeke E Boy where he wanted her to go. He realized that he needed to be more forceful with her; after all, she’s a big lady weighing 22,000 lbs!

Pushing Daylight

It was a beautiful sunset, but it was getting darker and darker and we were definitely pushing daylight with no nav lights. Once we got into the harbor entrance, the boat was rocking side to side. It was very choppy, like in a bathtub getting sloshed back and forth, which meant it was too dangerous to go on top and get the dock lines ready. Kyle did a beautiful job docking at the seawall – especially because we pulled in front of a lot of people walking along the downtown sidewalks. There were folks ready to help, but laughed at us when I said we didn’t have any lines ready … newbies! The risk to attached dock lines in the choppy waters was not worth falling off the boat.

Shows Over, Folks!

As we were getting the lines set and tying up along the seawall, we heard over a loud-speaker, “Ladies and Gentleman, the show will begin in 5 minutes.” What did we get ourselves into was my first thought, and then I thought, Ladies and Gentlemen you just saw the show … our amazing boating docking skills! Ha, don’t get cocky just yet! Well, soon after that, we had front row seats to the Grand Haven Musical Fountain show! We couldn’t have timed our arrival any more perfectly if we actually had planned to make the show.

On a high note 🎶

Yum, leftovers

Fortunately we had plenty of food that we packed and hadn’t been eating, and we had really good pork and beans leftovers to heat up.  We didn’t stay up too late.  First of all, Kyle was being a light and electricity “police” because we didn’t have access to shore power to charge our batteries.  He knew the batteries needed to be replaced and didn’t know how long they could hold up over night without power.  And we planned for a very early wake up call to continue on our journey.

We were docked along the downtown Grand Haven footpath / seawall, and Kyle was nervous that anyone could hop on the boat – plus a “creepy” fishing boat pulled up right next to us in the middle of the night. Needless to say, Kyle didn’t get much sleep.

Thank you and g’night

We put into practice our new protocols and things seemed to improve. Sometimes preparation is key but it’s also good to be flexible. We couldn’t have timed our arrival any more perfectly if we had tried to make that show. And while we could’ve been more prepared by getting the dock lines ready sooner, we didn’t want to push it with the boat chop in the harbor entrance. In the end, it worked out ok for us. Were things starting to improve?!?

We set the alarms for 3:30 am in hopes for a successful, but long, day home to New Buffalo the next day . . .

Tell us what you think

THANK YOU again for the love, support and prayers during our journey home. We’d love to hear what you think of our 1st actual sailing adventure on SV Zeke E Boy. Please add your comments, feedback and encouragement below.

– Kara from Zeke Life

Live like Zeke
You’re such a good boy!