Shuffling off to Buffalo (or Musing on a Last Passage on Lake Erie)

At exactly 4:45pm on August 23 we give up our designation as the live-aboard couple on Battery Park’s A dock and officially become gypsies on the water.  With the docklines cast off, our tether to shoreside life is more ephemeral - cell phone, email, and mail forwarding service are what will link us to friends and family. Our home is a 44’ by 13’ fiberglass shell and our cars have morphed into two folding bikes and an inflatable dinghy. Some say change keeps you young – if that’s true we’ve discovered the fountain of youth in the last couple of months.  Our departure involves a quick motor past the Sandusky Sailing Club, a place that figured large into our recent sailing life.  Then, the sails are unfurled, and we head out on to Lake Erie, past Cedar Point Amusement Park, for the last time.  Leaving friends, family, and familiar waters will be the most difficult change.

It’s now just past sunset and I am taking the first night watch.  The wind is 12 – 15 knots on our beam, the seas are flat, and the lights of Cleveland are ahead as we skim along the southern shoreline.  It’s one of those nights that make you wax poetic about this amazing sailing venue.  Burt takes an equally pleasant second watch.  I come back on at 4am.  We go over the commercial traffic situation and what the weather gods have in mind for us.  There’s a large storm cell covering much of the Lake that is just about to hit. It shows no lightning but there is plenty of rain imbedded – sorry about your luck, Prue.  With the rain comes more wind than the predicted 15 – 25; I should have paid more attention to the tight pressure gradient.  In fact I am seeing gusts in the 40’s.  The main has a good sized reef but I take in more of the jib, leaving the boat a bit unbalanced and the autopilot overworked. It’s time to hand steer, and I struggle to keep the boat from rounding up.  After a while, it gets to be too much so I give a shout to Burt to come up and take over – sorry about your luck, Burt.  Nine hours of sharing steering duties while surfing down waves at speeds sometimes over 11 knots brings us into Presque Isle Bay (Erie, PA).

Presque Isle Lagoon anchorage

 The boat performed marvelously but the crew is exhausted. The anchor goes down in a little lagoon that also is home to the Presque Isle Park Marina, we look around to see the only other inhabited boat, commenting “we know those folks”, and promptly fall asleep.  After a lengthy nap, shower, and dinner, it’s back to bed.  But the fun is not over yet.  In the middle of the night a strong cold front comes through.  We wake up enough to close all the hatches and ports, missing most of the spectacular lightning show and any knowledge of the tornado warnings.

The next morning we wake to a clear blue sky and what promises to be Lake Erie at its finest.  The people of Erie are strutting their stuff these days as last year Presque Isle State Park was awarded the title “Best State Park in the United States.” That’s no surprise. With a 13 miles paved bicycle path wandering through dense deciduous forests, along marshes and lagoons, past vistas across the bay to the city of Erie, and along miles of dune rimmed beaches, it’s been a favorite destination for us for many years. In two days we make two laps on the bike trail, stopping to sit and walk along the beaches and to read all the interpretive signage.  After all, this is where Admiral Perry and the American forces built the brigs Niagara and Lawrence which figured so heavily in the Battle of Lake Erie, fought near Put-in-Bay in the western portion of Lake Erie.  They have a relatively short Perry’s Monument in the park as compared to the one at Put-in-Bay.  Apparently, winning a significant battle in the War of 1812 trumps building warships.

View of the "other " Perry's Monument

Endless dune rimmed beaches

View over Presque Isle Bay to Erie, PA

Returning to the boat, we finally rendezvous with Eric and Anne on s/v Leah (hailing port: Earth – always loved that concept).  They sail out of a harbor near Sandusky, and we see them often out on the Lake.  They are taking a cruise around Lake Erie, but talk is more about preparations for full time cruising. Like many we encounter, they are hoping to make that transition. The sailing portion is always a minor concern – more important is figuring out how to get rid of your accumulated stuff, maintain your shoreside responsibilities, and make a boat a home rather than just a weekend get-away.  It leaves me numb to think of what we have accomplished in the past several years to just get to this point.

The weather gods are at it again.  Our planned departure for Buffalo on Saturday evening gets moved up to Friday evening as a strong northeast wind is predicted on Saturday, compliments of Hurricane Irene.  We leave Presque Isle at sunset and motor onto the Lake in calm conditions.  My two hour watch is extended to four hours – it is another spectacular night, even if there is no wind for sailing. I just can’t bring myself to go below decks so I give Burt the extra break. Without ambient light, the stars are unusually brilliant.  The top of our mast plots our course onto the Milky Way; the small towns along both coasts sparkle in the distance giving me the reassurance we are not alone out here.  When Burt finally appears on deck a light breeze comes up.  We unfurl the sails and quietly work our way to a sunrise arrival in Buffalo. We’ve covered over 200 miles in this jaunt down Lake Erie.

Buffalo is a gritty town and a lot of that grit is settling on our decks as we are in an industrial area of town at RCR Buffalo Yacht yard. Along the waterway are mostly defunct factories.  We’re fortunate that the one directly across is a General Mills facility, so the air smells of Honey Nut Cheerios rather than oil refinery pollution. The outer fill area of the harbor once housed many factories and freighter docks.  Now it is being reclaimed as park land with a lengthy series of bike paths.  It’s strange to see the rusting hulks of steel mills juxtaposed against a windmill farm and large new municipal marina.   

Contrasts along the Buffalo waterfront

The friendly locals say Buffalo is seeing a renaissance with the factory jobs being replaced with a strong financial center and medical research facilities.  Tomorrow our mast is being taken down.  The yard employees we have met so far seem very professional so this should be a relatively easy task, we hope.

How did all this nonsense get started?

What happens in your childhood often follows you through life.  Both of us grew up in families that enjoyed sailing.  Burt's parents owned and raced a Flying Scot in Mansfield, Ohio while my father built several sailboats during his youth and was the Sea Scout leader for Chicago prior to World War II.  Burt raced his family's Flying Scot and eventually purchased his own Lightning to race.  My family often took vacations in Michigan and Maine that focused on sailing. We met at the University of Michigan while undergraduates - the "pick-up line" was "How would you like to crew for me on my Lightning?" Little did I know that the Lightning was old, wooden, and very leaky and that crewing involved sitting on the floor boards and bailing for all I was worth.  A new, dry boat followed shortly and the relationship took a turn for the better. Thirty nine years later, including two sons and two grandsons, we're still sailing together along with our offspring who also enjoy the pastime.

For a number of years we competitively raced our Lightning until work, graduate school, and an expanding family made the travel too difficult.  The Lightning was sold; windsurfers and a US1 (a Laser on steroids) replaced it. The boys learned to sail off a beach on Lake Erie supplemented by occasional bare boat charters in southern waters. Once the last college tuition payment was made, it was time to indulge ourselves with the purchase of our Corsair 31 trimaran, Irrational Exuberance. We docked her at the Sandusky Sailing Club on Lake Erie and enjoyed exploring our local waters with a passion. One of the benefits of a folding trimaran was that it could be trailered to distant destinations.  We had many trips to the Florida Keys during the winter months along with two trips to Lake Huron's North Channel and one trip each to southern New England and the Florida panhandle.

 Irrational Exuberance under sail on Lake Erie

The die was cast - we loved the cruising lifestyle, but the Corsair was too small for full time cruising so it was time for a change in boats.  The "five year plan" was put into action.  The first two years were spent researching blue water cruising boats that fit our specific requirements and inspecting possible choices in various locations on the East Coast. In the spring of 2009 we found Exuberant in Oriental, NC.  She was a 1992 Hylas 44, one of the rare ones that weren't in the charter trade in the Caribbean.  She was lightly used and structurally in excellent condition, but her systems were original and outdated.  Three weeks of work that June in Oriental got her into condition to make the trek back to Lake Erie, and then the work really started. Two years later we are still finishing up the refit.  Meanwhile, Burt retired, the house was sold, our possessions were downsized and put into storage, and the cars were sold. We currently live on the boat full time in Sandusky, Ohio. In the summer of 2010, we took off for nine weeks for a shakedown cruise through Lake Huron to the North Channel, an opportunity to see how we could handle the boat and what improvements still needed to be made. It's a pleasant lifestyle - we take time out for last sails in our home waters and enjoy waterfront dining on deck every evening.

Exuberant at Bear Drop Harbor in the North Channel

So, now we are down to the wire. In a little over two weeks we begin the trip to the Atlantic Ocean.  It's a time of mixed emotions.  There's the stress of finishing up the installation of a water maker and figuring out finally resting places for our on board possessions and provisions.  We are taking some sails to favorite destinations to say good bye to the places and people we have treasured over the past years on Lake Erie. We are collecting email addresses, phone numbers, and destinations for rendezvouses with our many sailing friends. We will spend one final weekend with family before leaving our Ohio roots.  And we wonder, are we really insane or are we about to embark on a dream of a lifetime?