#60 The Rugged and Beautiful West Coast of Michigan. Part 1.

Goodbye to Mackinac Island! Onward to Petoskey. The origin of the mysterious Petoskey stone.

Petoskey stones! For sale everywhere around Petoskey, as jewelry and also affixed to anything you can glue them to, like the top of wine corks, candelabras, hats and brooches. These fossil rocks, (like everything else once you learn enough about it), are fascinating. Leftover fossilized coral—specifically Hexagonaria percarinata—lived in the shallow saltwater seas covering what is now Michigan during the Devonian period, roughly 350 million years ago. (Long, long before those glaciers I talked about when we were in Canada.) Each stone is actually a cross-section of a coral colony made up of many individual polyps, and the honeycomb-like pattern you see on a polished stone is the fossilized skeletal structure of the ancient coral. That small dot at the center of each hexagon marks where the coral’s tentacles once extended to catch food. Over millions of years, the coral reefs were buried, fossilized, and eventually uncovered and scattered by that glacial activity of the last ice age, which ground up the ancient bedrock and deposited the stones across the landscape, for whatever reason, mostly around Michigan’s Little Traverse Bay near the town of Petoskey. The stones are plain old gray when dry but their pattern becomes vivid when wet or polished, so people looking for them will spray water on the stones on the beach so they can spot them. (Since we had no water with us, I suggested peeing on the beach to find them, but Cheryl was adamant that was not an option.) Amazingly, you can still find them on any beach in the area, and hold in your hand a piece of an ancient once-living coral reef, from a time when the precursors to sharks were the top predator, and well over one hundred million years before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

As we travel down the west coast of Michigan, we’ve been fortunate to have several of Cheryl’s friends stop by for visits. In Petoskey it was Ray and Kristin. They’ve been following our blog and were camping in Cheboygan when we rounded the state. We were so happy that they took the time out of their busy schedule to make the trip over to us. Cheryl was in desperate need of an old friend hug, it had been awhile!

Diane and Charles also came to Petoskey. They get the award for traveling the farthest to come find us. They came from Gladwin (over two hours away). We had dinner together the night they arrived and the next morning they took us for a car ride to Harbor Springs. What a treat- the car ride AND spending time with them. Diane has been a best friend of Cheryl’s for years and has kept an eye on us almost every single travel day. I know I’d better keep Cheryl safe, sound, and happy or I will have to answer to Diane.

The water all through this area is almost tropical in its clarity. Those plants are ten feet tall.

Lake Michigan is just – immense. I look at that and sometimes am amazed that I take a little bitty chip of a boat out there. !

But it does deliver some spectacular sunsets.

After Petoskey it was on to Charlevoix, home of the famous Mushroom Homes, built by eccentric architect and realtor Earl Young, who was more concerned with the outside presentation than any livability inside. Many of them have tiny kitchens and bathrooms. We took a tour and saw most of the 26 or so he built, with a great tour guide who made it interesting.

That roof is Norwegian thatch, brought here and installed at great expense. Like, more than the rest of the house cost.

One evening we had more great conversation at docktails, with Ti Amo, Just Be, Grateful, Annticipation, and Makin’ Hay.

In Charlevoix, Alicia, Jerry, and Mason stopped by. Mason had fun feeding the ducks while we grownups chatted. Alicia is the daughter of one of Cheryl’s high school BFF’s. She and Jerry are trying to figure out how to make the Loop part of their young lives. I’m sure they will figure it out and we will be reading THEIR blog someday soon!

From Charlevoix we headed to Leland, home of FishTown, a restored tribute to the fishing industry of years ago.

There was a beautiful beach next to the marina, so we (Cheryl, while I napped) walked the beach and looked for Petoskey stones. That is actually the entrance to the marina, getting in there was a bit like threading a needle with a 40 foot boat.

A local guy owns this cutie, he came down to the marina one evening, drove right down the boat ramp and out into the harbor, tooled around a bit watching the sunset, then later drove right back up the ramp and home, a few blocks away.

While there we welcomed more visitors Tom and Barb with their friends John and Rory. The two couples own a cottage together on Torch Lake, a little over an hour away. Although Barb appreciated our adventurous spirit and the “cuteness” of MoonShine, it appears that she would become an instant widow if Tom even mentions the possibility of them Looping. It was fun spending time together again.

John and Cheryl also visited us in Leland. John is a college friend of Cheryl’s. He’s been following our blog and made hooking up with us fit into their schedule. He and Cheryl have a home in Elk Rapids and made the trip to us from there. It was fun telling them about the behind the scene antics to some of our blog stories. Hopefully we will have many more stories to tell them when we get together for a Marshall Morlock concert!

Ron and Jane made the run with us from Leland to Frankfort. We’ve not had many people actually travel with us since the logistics can be troublesome so we were thrilled to have them aboard. That day was an absolutely gorgeous travel day on Lake Michigan. Ron and Jane have been avid followers of our blog (many days watching our travels in real time). They even were watching us in the Delaware Bay when we determined we were missing a propeller. Ron texted us to see if we were ok which was much appreciated. We Face-timed with them while crossing Lake Ontario before they’d even finished their first cup of coffee. So it was extra special having them participate in our Loop.

When we got to Frankfort, Jane had the honor of moving our marker from our start in Leland to our finish in Frankfort, about a 40 mile run on a very good sailing day.

This was our run from Frankfort to Pentwater. This is the kind of day we like!

Pentwater turned out to be another great place to hang out a few days. The salmon are running here, which means lots of boats out fishing, which means lots of fish to clean.

Cheryl had a morning out at a local art shop, Jilly’s, making fused glass ornaments with fellow Loopers April and Kelly.

I saw this while walking around town. Not real confidence building, considering that we have to sail the area on Tuesday!

There I was, shuffling aimlessly through another tourist trap—past the decorative driftwood, past the scented candles labeled “Ocean Breeze” —when I stumbled upon the Holy Grail. Tucked in the back corner, glowing like the Ark of the Covenant, was a commercial cooler filled with root beer. Not just a root beer, mind you, but dozens of root beers, including small-batch brews I had never heard of, probably crafted by wild-bearded monks in the mountains of Vermont. I’m a guy who views root beer as a vital nutrient, mind you, a requirement when paired with pizza. IBC of course being the top shelf choice. This town is looking better every day! (That lone pickle-flavored soda is an abomination!) While in Pentwater we also went to a comedy show, another antique wooden boat show which included a parade right behind our boat, a sidewalk Farmer’s Market, and I finally got to fly my kite on the beach. Between all that and the root beer find, a very nice stop!

You notice a lot of things on a trip like this, one of which is the peculiar transformation that occurs when you live and travel aboard a boat, which is: you become, for the first time since possibly childhood, a full-fledged, card-carrying walker, a member of a group that humans have been quietly trying to eliminate since the invention of the drive-thru. While living on a boat, “going to the store for milk” is not a thing you do by pressing a button on a key fob and easing yourself into a climate-controlled recliner with cupholders; it is an actual expedition, on actual legs, involving actual sidewalks. Meanwhile the rest of humanity zips by, sealed inside glossy two-ton wheeled boxes, windows up, radios blaring, listening to somebody explain cryptocurrency on the radio. In a car you gaze out at the world the way you might gaze at a nature documentary — mildly interested, completely unthreatened, looking through a layer of tinted glass that insulates you from reality. Boat walkers on a trek for milk, on the other hand, are out there in it, sweating gently and encountering things: a flower garden stunning in its complexity, a guy walking a happy dog, a couple visiting from France, another boater coming the other way who will absolutely stop and tell you, unprompted, the best place in town to eat. These conversations are almost invariably interesting, because anyone who chooses to walk, is, by circumstance, more open to human interaction than the guy sitting next to you at a red light. You discover that the trip to buy milk is not merely an annoying interval between having no milk and having milk. It is, somehow, an event. You arrive home with sore feet, a gallon of milk, and the smug, unshakeable sense that you have just done something.

A few posts back I said that a boat was like a magic carpet. The more I think about that, the more I like the analogy. To back a vessel from its slip in staid Knoxville, Tennessee and steer it into the quiet currents of the Great Loop is an act of deliberate apostasy, a quiet rebellion against a world that too often measures human worth in performance reviews, quarterly gains and productivity targets. Like the magic carpet of Arabian lore—that mythical tapestry woven with secret threads capable of bearing adventurers across the skies—a cruising boat becomes an instrument of translation, lifting one entirely out of the realm of the ordinary and onto a new and uncharted compass. Just as silk rugs floated above minarets waiting to deliver passengers to foreign, uncharted courts, MoonShine moves us over water, carrying its lucky inhabitants toward hidden marshlands, misty bayous, and coastal towns where time seems to bend to the rhythm of the tides. The boat offers a life refreshingly out of joint with modern existence, an otherworldly lifestyle where one’s home is both anchor and chariot, and the daily chores shift from answering emails to reading the sky for weather fronts. Breaking free from the inanities of the modern world—the coerced hysteria and orchestrated outrage of news feeds, the tyranny of suburban lawn care, the artificial urgency of routine—requires a rare kind of courage, a willingness to slice through the heavy, invisible tether of societal expectations. The hardest magic is not getting the boat to move, but getting yourself to leave behind the absurdities of the world you came from—the alerts, obligations, purchases, opinions, and the manufactured, false urgencies that cling like burrs to the human mind. The boat can carry you away from most of that, but only if you are willing, at last, to step onto the carpet and let it fly. In return you gain freedom and clarity, as well as the ancient satisfaction of arriving somewhere under your own command. Once you cast off, the carpet catches the wind, the water takes the bow, and you find yourself floating across a landscape transformed, endlessly free and entirely at the mercy of whatever map you choose to unfurl.

Our boat may be made of fiberglass and powered by diesel engines instead of secret threads, but she is a magic carpet indeed.

For this update I was going to include the entire west coast of Michigan, but once again, there’s too much going on! So I’m stopping here. We are in Pentwater waiting out some wind and rain, (5 to 6 foot seas out there today!) and so I’ll write up the rest of the state as we go. So far we’ve visited Petoskey, Charlevoix, Leland, Frankfort and Pentwater. There are a few more stops along the way where we’ll see friends and then it’s a big stop in Chicago, and finally, the rivers again.

“Whether it’s a longing for adventure, or an archetypical yearning to shuffle off earth-bound cares, or the romance, silence and mystery of the sea, something stirs within us the moment we cast off and move gently away from land. We understand the feeling of entering a new world, less encumbered, sometimes more dangerous, always more romantic, and infinitely more unpredictable than the land-locked world of daily drudge.”