Port Huron to Home Expedition

A version of this story was originally published in Ocean Paddler Magazine. I took the trip in 2011.

The shore, obscured by fog, looked gray, and the hard edges of the three-story mansions separated by tall fences soften in the mist. At each house, a metal breakwall extended 30 or 40 feet out into Lake Huron, the second largest Great Lake. Pulleys and cranes large enough to lift a 20-foot powerboat topped the walls. I stopped paddling and pulled my hood over my head. My fingers – the skin shriveled, white and stiff – fumbled to pull the tighteners. I pushed the cord into my mouth, bit and pulled. My vision narrowed to just the extent of my hood and the wind blew the bill into my eyes. I used the palms of my hands to push the collar over my mouth and felt the pleasure of my breath warming up my chin and neck. As I looked out to sea, I saw a larger wave coming at me. My boat teetered away from the wave and towards the water, but I grabbed the paddle and braced. Foam poured off the wave’s top, crashed over my head and enveloped my kayak. It pushed me towards a breakwall, but diminished and then disappeared as it deposited me into deeper water on the shore side of a sandbar.

I paddled back out over the hidden sandbar into the fog. The mansions passed by; each one as tall as the last. For a while, I stared through my hood at my compass. To pass time, I counted my paddle strokes. Then from my right-side, a deep, bassy fog horn broke through the roar of the wind. My head snapped to look out to sea expecting to see a freighter, but a gray wall of fog blocked my view. I looked shoreward and just visible was a woman, wearing a bikini, lounging on a breakwall with her knees bent and arms behind her. I did a second glance, and she was still there. A statue maybe, I thought. She eventually disappeared into the fog as I paddled towards camp.

                My trip had just begun and I had a few doubts. I was near Port Huron, Michigan about 800 miles away from home and my final destination, Grand Marais, Minnesota, and paddling up the western coast of Lake Huron. My plan was to paddle about 300 miles to the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan, then swinging east to the St. Mary River system. I would then paddle up the St. Mary to the Soo Locks, lock through to Lake Superior, and follow the south shore of Lake Superior for approximately 300 miles to Houghton. In Houghton, I planned on catching a ferry to take me 40 miles across the big lake to Isle Royale. From there, I’d paddle to my house in Grand Marais, Minnesota. I had approximately 50 days to complete the trip, but the fog, cold and wind were making me doubt my decision to take this trip solo. There was no way home except by kayak and no one lived nearby to come pick me up if I decided to bail. I was alone, in the fog with shriveled, white and stiff fingers, and even with all my paddling clothing on my teeth chattered. When I planned the trip, I wanted an adventure, and it looked like I was going to get it.

                I wasn’t sure how I’d recognize the state park I planned to camp at from the sea of houses I was paddling through, but when the shoreline of houses changed to a sand beach backed with a dark forest of budding ash and oak, I knew I was there. I paddled along the beach looking for an opening in the woods. Several groups of people were walking on the beach. When I got close to them, I surfed to shore while the people on shore stopped walking and stared at me coming in with waves breaking behind me. I landed, pulled my kayak up onto the sandy beach, and said “Hi” to one couple.

                After chatting, I asked, “Where’s the campground?”

                The man dressed in a clean, thick, brown winter jacket, pointed to a small opening in the oaks. A sandy path lead up a steep incline to mowed grass. The top of a cinderblock shower building was just above the path. He said, “Just right there.”

                “Is the park office nearby so I can pay for camping?”

                He scrunched his eyebrows and his eyes dazed for a second until he said, “Just follow the road for about ½ mile until you get to the entrance. It’s just a short drive.” And so began a pattern that repeated itself nightly on Michigan’s “thumb.” Locals call the southeastern coast of Michigan the thumb, because if you raise your right hand with your palm facing your eyes, your hand’s shape looks like the shape of the Lower Peninsula. Lake Michigan runs up the left side of your hand and Lake Huron runs along the right side. The gap between the thumb and index finger is Saginaw Bay, a 1,143-square-mile bay. The coast running south of Saginaw Bay is called the thumb. At your middle finger, the almost 5-mile long Mackinac Bridge (pronounced Mack∙i∙naw) spans across the Straits of Mackinac and connects the Lower Peninsula to the U.P.

I was 10 miles from the base of the thumb, and about 90 miles from my first long crossing of the mouth of the bay via Charity Island. Even 90 miles away, the 16-mile crossing loomed large in my mind – it would be my longest crossing to date. If I could make it, I felt, I could make it to the U.P.

                After walking a half mile through the open oak and ash forest – trillium covered the forest floor – I found the park office.

                “Just one car?” the park attendant, a college-aged girl home for the summer, asked.

                “I don’t have a car. I kayaked in,” I said.

                “Wasn’t it wavy?” she asked and then proceeded to tell me about the upcoming storm of predicted northeastern wind sustained at gales for three days.

                The sound of crashing waves drifted up from the beach behind me. I left the upwind stakes in the ground while taking down my tent and it violently flapped in the wind. I stuffed the rain fly and then pulled the stakes, grabbed the canopy and stuffed it away. I scanned the trampled grassy campsite for anything that I was leaving behind, and then glanced one last time at the empty state park RV campground I had spent the last three nights at.

                Once packed, I pointed my kayak into the stiff northeast wind. Unlike the day before, no sand blew down the beach, but leftover waves rolled towards me. I seal launched. Because of the weather, I had only paddled 10 miles and it was day four of my trip. I should have been 40 to 50 miles up the thumb. It felt discouraging to be so far behind this early in the trip. The weather report called for a small craft advisory with headwinds all day, but I was on the water early and planned to reach the next park after just 12 miles. I figured I’d get there by 2pm.

                Waves coming down the 170-mile fetch of Lake Huron poured over my deck and hit me in the chest as I paddled out over the foam piles. I held up and timed my forward travel to avoid the breaking waves until I finally found deep enough water to get out of the surf about 150 yards off shore. Then I turned up lake and paddled into quartering overhead waves. The wind whistled through my neoprene skull cap and felt intimidating. My shoulders stiffened and I tensed up. When I realized I was tense, I forced myself to relax. The shore went by slowly, and each paddle stroke felt like I was paddling against mud.

                The houses on the shore were smaller than the first day of the trip. Most were one- or two-story single family houses. Some had breakwalls that extended out into the water, but most had a wall that protected the yard from the beach. Many had sheds, boat houses or smaller cabins near the shore. I wondered if the houses were used year-round or just for weekends. I imagined that they were vacation homes for the well-to-do from Detroit, because nobody seemed to be home at any of the houses.

                By noon, I had stopped shivering and that seemed like a good thing to me. As I rose to the top of a wave, I could see the protected harbor of Lexington. It looked large on the horizon, like it was only a half-mile away, but it took me almost an hour to get there. I landed in the harbor next to empty docks and sat next to my boat with the wind to my back. I liked it that there was no wind in my face. It felt peaceful and seemed like a perfect place to go to sleep. I leaned forward, rested my head in my hands and closed my eyes. I woke up minutes later, looked around at the marina and something with me didn’t feel right. I felt cold, empty and hollow inside. I felt dazed and couldn’t think of what I needed to do. I walked around the marina, but everything was closed except for a restroom.

                Inside the restroom, I stood in front of a hand drier and felt the warm air blow across my wetsuit. It felt good. After pressing the drier button a dozen or more times, I realized I needed heat. I retrieved my clothing from the kayak and changed out of the wet paddling clothing. In town, I found Wimpy’s Place, a narrow hallway café with wooden booths on one side and a counter with stools lining the other. I ordered a burger and hot chocolate.

When I finished my first cup of hot chocolate, the waitress refilled it. She refilled it six or seven times, but even after I ate the burger I wasn’t getting warm; I felt colder. I put my paddling jacket back on. After an hour or so in the café, I went back to the harbor, set my tent behind the marina, crawled into my sleeping bag and drifted to sleep thinking about how I just paddled 10 miles today. I’d need to step up the progress if I was going to make the remaining hundreds of miles. I also thought about the 16-mile crossing. What if I had wind like today?

The next few days, I made good time paddling my way up the thumb in relatively calm water. Unfortunately, the fog set in without relief; even at night fog turned a glowing white from city lights obscured the sky. During the day, I paddled in a virtual fog bubble. The rippled blue surface of Lake Huron formed a flat plane that extended out 30 to 40 yards to the edges of a 180-degree fog dome that arched overhead. When the sun broke through on occasion, I glanced around for a fog-bow, a dim rainbow, but the rest of the time I watched my compass and tried to calm my thoughts by thinking of my paddle strokes.

Along the way, I made plans to meet a friend of a friend, Tim Gallaway, at Port Crescent State Park. Tim is a tall, skinny, engineering college student and self-proclaimed kayaking bum, who guides and teaches kayaking during the summer months. He’s well-known in the Greenland paddling community. He and I would cross Saginaw Bay together via Charity Island. We decided to take the longest possible crossing. Our route would take us along the thumb’s shore for 3 miles, and then at Hat Point, we’d paddle off towards Charity Island until we arrived on its limestone shores 16 miles later.

The day started with a gradual red and orange sunrise over a mirror-calm Saginaw Bay. A thick haze, almost fog, obscured the horizon. We couldn’t see the island or the other side of the bay. We launched and paddled to the Hat Point without event. Neither of us needed to get out of the boat, so we paddled on towards the dark sliver of a split between flat blue water and a hazy blue sky. At points, we drifted apart and then came back together. Our speed was good in the beginning, but after about 10 miles, we slowed down. I felt less motivated because the haze surrounding us reduced our world to the split between the sky and water. At about 4 miles away, Tim announced that he thought he could see Charity Island. A slightly gray smudge on the horizon just off our bows appeared and disappeared over the next few miles until we could see the outline of the island’s ash and oak forest.

We landed after paddling through a shallow that extended what seemed like a mile from shore. Table-sized and smaller limestone rocks broke the surface of the water here and there, and I was glad for the glass-calm water, and I was glad that the crossing was over.  I stumbled out of my boat and stretched. We ate lunch and then each of us walked off to explore. I found an ash tree that was larger around than I could hug and took a nap while thinking about the island’s history.

Travelers ranging from the aboriginal Ojibwa inhabitants, who called Charity Island Shawangunk (Green Gull), to fur trading voyageurs, who called the smaller Charity the Crossing Island, to sailors in the early 1800s, and probably more in the 12,000 years that humans have traversed the Great Lakes, have used Charity Island and its smaller sister Little Charity Island as a way to safely cross the 30 miles across the bay’s mouth. Because Lake Huron creates sudden, violent storms most small-craft travelers preferred smaller crossings, and the Charities provided the shorter crossings. As little as two 6-mile crossings via Little Charity Island could get a small boat from the south to the north shore of Saginaw Bay, thus saving the traveler over 90 miles through America’s largest continuous freshwater wetland system[i] – think swampy, hard-to-reach shores with shallow water that extends miles out into the bay in places. Because of this, the Ojibwa believed the islands were a gift from Kitchi-Manitou, the Great Spirit, and early white settlers believed that they were gifts from God, thus the name Charity.[ii]

                Rocky shoals and shallow water surround the two islands and as commercial interests, such as logging, iron ore extraction and fishing, began to expand across the Great Lakes a lighthouse was built. Construction on the Charity Island light began in 1856. The 39-foot light could be seen from 13 miles away, and it made the passage safer.[iii] Eventually, the shipping traffic slowed down, the fishing stock crashed and less commercial interest used the bay. A new light reduced the need for the Charity Island Light and the old light was abandoned in 1939.[iv] Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service owns all but a few acres of the island.

                In the morning, I announced it was my 40th birthday and we launched out into shoulder-high waves to complete the final 8 miles of the crossing from Charity Island to Whitestone Point. After we paddled past the old, whitewashed lighthouse, we immediately saw a tall white cliff directly on our compass heading.

                I turned to Tim and said, “I like it when the map is named after an appropriate land feature.”

                We paddled on, bobbing up and down in the waves until about half-way across when I saw a yellow, basketball-sized globe floating in the water. I told Tim that we should check it out. We paddled over and found a yellow birthday balloon floating in the middle of the bay, and it was my birthday! After finding the balloon, we closed in on the white cliff. It started to take a more chiseled shape with darker rectangular boxes covering it faces. We wondered if it was a rock quarry, but when we got closer, it became apparent that it was a large hotel. So much for naming the point after land features.

                At lunch, I traced a 20-foot long “40” into the sand and when Tim saw it he said, “Nicely played.” Later that day in Tawas Point State Park, a complete stranger brought two beers by our campsite and said, “It looks like you guys deserve a beer.” And, we found several morel mushrooms, an edible and delicious wild mushroom that grows only in the spring. We had paddled 24 miles, and although I felt tired, I felt good like I could do it again.

We had successfully completed the crossing that felt like a roadblock, we left Michigan’s thumb, the mileage picked up and I was half-way to the Mackinac Bridge and the U.P., which now felt like a formality instead of a faraway place. It was a great birthday, and the feeling on the expedition changed from worry to excitement.

                Days later, Tim had to leave and I set off from Harrisville State Park alone again paddling up Lake Huron’s shore. Although houses were present on the shore, they were smaller, mostly single story and they seemed older. By the end of the day, I made it to Negwegon State Park, a rustic, undeveloped park with a diverse forest that included mature pine stands, aspen stands and hardwood.

It was the first time in the trip that I felt far away from civilization. I camped alone on a grassy sand hill 10 feet above the water of Thunder Bay. A dense stand of ash and swamp mixed together in the woods behind my campsite. In the night, I woke to a deer grunting outside of my tent. When I pulled the zipper, the sound added the only manmade sound to the forest, and the deer ran off crashing through the forest, breaking sticks as it retreated.

                Fog covered Thunder Bay in the morning. It also clouded my choices. I originally wanted to cross the mouth of Thunder Bay, but I had doubts. The crossing was 10 miles, the wind felt like it was going to build, I couldn’t get a marine forecast on the radio, but if I traveled around the bay’s shore, it would take 25 miles. I was still several days behind schedule and needed to make up time to make it home by my deadline.

                Negwegon State park at the southern reach of Thunder Bay marks the southern boundary of the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, which preserves 448 miles of underwater terrain and 50 of the over 200 shipwrecks in the area. This part of Lake Huron is known as one of the most treacherous sections in the Great Lakes. Its unpredictable nature, sudden violent storms and dense fog have wrecked ships ranging from wooden schooners to modern freighters.[v]  

Tim and I had experienced one of those storms several days earlier. The sky changed from blue to cloudy in five minutes. Then the wind went from calm to shaking trees so hard that I thought their tops would break off. When the wind blew across the 30 yards separating us from shore – across mere 6-inch waves – it created a mist so dense that it consumed us in a white squall. It was the strongest wind  that I had ever paddled in. Then it ended a half-hour later. I didn’t want to experience that in the middle of the crossing, but I really didn’t want to paddle an extra 15 miles.

In the end I decided to give the crossing a go. Several small, low islands with scrubby forests sat near the south shore of Thunder Bay. Instead of paddling straight across, I decided to paddle about two miles to Scarecrow Island first and then complete the remaining 8 miles of the crossing from there. As I paddled through the dense fog, I watched my watch closely. The two miles would take about 35 minutes if I kept the same pace I had over the last two weeks.  Just before I saw the jagged outline of forest on Scarecrow, I heard the piercing chorus of 100s of gulls singing “seagull, seagull, seagull” over and over. I couldn’t see them, but they could perceive me.

                From there I followed my plotted course of 30 degrees. At first, over the top of the fog bank I could see the flat top of Alpena’s water tower to the north northwest. Its bright white paint under a deep blue sky felt comforting, but then the fog covered the sky. After an hour of complete white out, I began to doubt myself. I wrote in my journal later that night:

I wondered if I would make it. If not, what would happen? How would I signal help? Would the Coast guard or a charter hear me in Alpena?

                Then the fog started to break, and a limestone point appeared as a sliver of land about a mile and a half away. A cedar forest curved away from the point back into the bay. I landed, congratulated myself on having an adventure in the fog and promptly found weathered-gray boards that were pierced with rusted bolts and nuts, the remains of one or more ships that floundered near the point.

Later that day, while paddling over about 10 feet of water, I watched the lake’s floor pass by. I watched school of fat, brown carp pass by, and limestone boulders that looked like fossilized brain coral. Then I paddled over boards. When I turned around, I realized that I found an old rudder from a shipwreck. It was at least 8 to 10 feet long. It looked gray and weathered, but rusting metal bands still held the boards together. I wondered how old it could be. At least 100 years I guessed. I finished the day on a protected sand beach having paddled a little over 26 miles. Had I skipped the crossing, I’d have had to camp on the rocky, northern point of Thunder Bay.

                Over the next few days, tailwinds pushed me north. The mileage stacked up. The shoreline was continually developed. Only the day after Thunder Bay offered views of untouched shoreline in places. Instead of crossing to the U.P. at the Mackinac Bridge, I island hopped to Bois Blanc (called Bob-Lo), then to Round Island and finally on the morning of day 21 landed on Mackinac Island.

After paddling along a developed shoreline where almost every mile is house against house, I thought I had seen the worst of the development, but Mackinac Island was covered with large, multi-story hotels and a blindingly white stone fort, which crowned the top of the island. In the low morning sunlight, it glowed. The island itself is a bluff that rises out of the water. As the streets climb up the steep bluff sides, it creates a layering effect of houses. Five to six different layers rose from the main street to the fort. The main street was a narrow street with multi-story buildings lining it. It reminded me of the French Quarter in New Orleans. It seemed very Victorian.

                Mackinac Island has a long history of peaceful habitation, but in the late 1700s with the fur trade in full swing, the peaceful habitation heated up. The French and the British fought over control of the Straits of Mackinac; the country that controlled the straits controlled the fur trade. After forts on the mainland changed hands from the French to the British to the Ottawa chief Pontiac and then eventually back to the British, the British built a new more easily defended fort on Mackinac Island.

After the America Revolution, the British handed the fort over to the Americans but took it back in the War of 1812. The Americans got it back in 1815. It became America’s second national park in 1895. Since then it has become a tourist destination.[vi] Ferries from St. Ignas and Mackinaw City bring a non-stop stream of tourists to the island during the summer season.

                On the island there are no cars. Everything travels by horse. In the morning when I arrived, I watched supplies being unloaded from ferries transferred to flatbed trailers harnessed to horses. The trailers fanned out across the island delivering packages and dropping unpleasant “loads” right in the middle of the street. I walked down the street and stopped at Murdick’s Fudge, one of the oldest fudge manufacturers on the island. Inside I ordered fudge, which I couldn’t stop eating because it was so good. Later I learned that locals call tourists fudgies, because they take a day ferry to the island, buy their fudge and go home. I could understand why, it’s delicious.

                There’s something romantic and alluring about the island despite the touristy feel, and it drew me in. I didn’t want to kayak, but I needed to press on to St. Ignace, find a campsite and resupply. On the water, I bobbed up in down in shoulder high waves and watched the ferries cruise at 15 to 20 knots between the mainland and the island. The chart showed the designated ferry route and the ferries were sticking to it, so I plotted a course that would take me away from the route. About three miles into the four-mile crossing, I watched a ferry speed out of the mainland harbor, start to follow the ferry route, but then turn abruptly towards me. As it neared, all the riders gathered along rails closest to me, cheered and waved. I waved back and then took the breaking wake in the chest. The ferry had passed me at 15 knots less than 30 yards away. Shortly after I reached the mainland, a Coast Guard helicopter flew overhead, banked around me and turned around. I wondered if someone on the ferry had called 911, and the police dispatched the Coast Guard to take a look.

From St. Ignace, I paddled east through the Les Cheneaux Islands on mirror calm water in temperatures that caused me to bake inside my drysuit. The Les Cheneaux are well-known for elaborate mansions, wooden boat houses with a half dozen slips each filled with a restored wooden Chris-Craft powerboat. I kayaked past many and admired the glossy varnished finishes.

The gel coat on the bottom of my kayak, while never varnished, had looked glossy at the beginning of the trip. Now 23 days of dragging a loaded boat up beaches was wearing scratches into the hull. During the first week, I tried to baby my kayak and unload it before carrying it to my campsite, but that carefulness wore on me. Being solo and having to do everything by myself felt like three times the work of tripping with someone else.

I thought back to the beginning of my trip. I wanted to have an adventure, and although I’ve taken long distance trips before, I forgot that an adventure is mostly like working a 9 to 5 job; you get up every morning, make breakfast, go to your job, get home, eat, sleep and do it over again the next day. The three differences were that I needed to build my house and kitchen every night, the work was paddling, and that I didn’t get a day off unless the wind blew hard.

All along the trip, I met good people who helped me out in various ways. On my first night, someone invited me to their RV and cooked me lamb and gave me beer. Early in the trip at a campground where the campsites were a good distance from the landing, one man loaded my kayak onto his truck to move it to my site. A friend in Hessel let me crash at his place, and at a U.S. Forest Service campground just before I left Lake Huron and entered the St. Mary River, a group of four people fed me smoked trout, crackers and cheese. Later that night, they brought a plate of food and a beer over to me. On Lake Superior, I was invited into RVs, over for several dinners and people even gave me their phone numbers to call if I had an emergency.

Over two days, I paddled 45 miles up the St. Mary River system and arrived at the Soo Locks. There are two sets of locks at the Soo. The American locks are modern and designed to handle freighters up to 1000 feet long. The Canadian locks are historic and allow kayaks to lock-through. Both take ships around a set of rapids that separate Lake Superior from the lower Great Lakes. A city sits on each side of the river and bridge rises up over the Soo Locks connecting the American to the Canadian Sault Ste. Marie. Ahead of me, the bridge and the lock structures looked like a confusing array of lines.

I decided that using the Canadian lock was a better option than following the traditional portage several miles around the rapids, so I paddled from the American shore one mile across to the Canadian shore. To avoid getting lost, I followed the Canadian shore to the locks. In the distance I watched a thunderstorm coming towards me, but I figured that I would be able to paddle through the locks and get back to the American shore before it hit. To lock-through, you paddle up to the designated waiting area and wait until the red signaling light turns to green. When I stopped, I looked into a wide open lock with 20-foot or higher walls – big enough to cover the 21-foot drop from Lake Superior to the St. Mary. I waited for a green light, but nothing showed – not even a red light. I called the lock master on my VHF radio.

                He came back, “I’m sorry to inform you, but we’re suffering a city-wide power outage and we’re unable to lock you through at this time.”

                “Any idea on when you’ll get power. Over.”

                “No, sir. Power is out from here to St. Joseph. Over.”

                And then the thunderstorm hit. A torrent of warm rain started pelting the calm water. Soon the lightning and thunder were happening within a second of each other. Without a passport, I couldn’t land in Canada, so I paddled to the end of the lock’s breakwater, found a hole big enough to stick my finger in and stayed there pushing myself as close to the wall as I could get. My only thought was how great of a conductor carbonfiber is. I didn’t want my carbon paddle anywhere near me.

                After 45 minutes, the rain stopped and the lightning moved far enough away for me to consider it safe. I paddled back to the American side passing the American locks. The locks were open and the red and white bow of a freighter towered over me. I found safety inside a harbor where the harbor master took pity on me. He feed me leftover pizza and then shuttled me around the locks in his truck. I paddled about a mile before I realized that I was now on Whitefish Bay and my home waters of Lake Superior. A feeling of relief washed over me – I was almost home.

                Whitefish Bay lies at the southeastern point of Lake Superior. Its American shoreline, the one I followed, runs in a long curve that makes an “L” approximately 60 miles from Sault Ste. Marie to Whitefish Point. At the point, Lake Superior’s Shipwreck Coast begins. It consists of approximately 50 miles of unending flat sand beaches with a boreal forest so dense that you can’t see past the first row of trees behind it. Few roads reach the shore here, and it has little development. It feels like the end of the world, and a newspaper article that I stumbled across in a lighthouse on the Shipwreck Coast described it as the “Loneliest Stretch of Shoreline in America.” While the beaches provide great landing sites for kayaks in calm water, the exposed beaches, hidden sandbars and shallow shoreline turn into a sea of froth when the wind blows.

The prevailing northwest wind wails across Superior’s surface and builds waves that converge at Whitefish Point. Add in fog, crystal clear waters that rarely rise above 50 degrees Fahrenheit and the fact that all ship traffic must squeeze past Whitefish Point to pass into the lower Great Lakes and you have the ingredients for ship collisions, wrecks and deadly disasters. Over 300 of Lake Superior’s 550 plus shipwrecks occurred along the Shipwreck Coast. In 1975, the 729-foot Edmund Fitzgerald, Lake Superior’s most famous wreck, floundered here in 30-foot waves just before it reached the safety of Whitefish Bay.[vii] The coast is so deadly that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the U.S. erected and manned a series of life-saving stations along the coast. Daily, men walked the beaches from station to station looking for wrecks and survivors. I hoped to pass through the Shipwreck Coast in two days in calm weather, but it wasn’t to be.

                Even though my tent was pitched deep in an open white pine forest, it shook with each gust. I pulled the hood of my sleeping bag tight around my face so that just my mouth was exposed, but I still needed to wear all my clothing to stay warm. Outside rain pelted the tent’s fly with a constant pitter-patter turned rumble. The sound of surf pounding the shoreline drowned out the rain’s rumble with each new wave slamming the beach. At lunch, I felt too hungry to stay in the sleeping bag, so I retrieved a food bag and before retreating to my tent looked out at the big lake. It was full of whitecaps as far as I could see. Inside the pine forest, I watched clouds of sand blow further into the woods. I was wind bound for the day.

                In the morning, the wind still blew from the northwest, but the sky was a hazy light blue without a cloud in it. The waves were larger than yesterday, but the white caps were few and they looked like rollers. I waited for a lull in the waves before pushing myself into the surf. Breaking waves rolled towards me and after I made it over a few foam piles, I realized that I misjudged their heights. The outer breaking waves looked like refrigerators falling over. I held my position in the foam waiting for the right moment to break out. Then to my left, I noticed a rip pushing out through the waves. The lake looked calmer in the rip, so I sprinted to it when the waves calmed for a second. Once in the rip, I paddled out and made it past the breakers without passing over anything higher than my head.  I wasn’t really looking forward to landing a fully-load sea kayak later in the day. I paddled on trying to keep that thought in the back of my mind.

                By afternoon, in the distance I saw a tall white twig of a lighthouse. It was Crisp Point Lighthouse; a light that was almost destroyed by Lake Superior’s furry. A restoration effort eventually stabilized the beach for now and then restored the lighthouse. It had taken me six hours to paddle the 11 miles from my camp to the lighthouse. During that time, the northwest wind kept pushing me towards the hidden sandbars. One second I rode up and down on the six foot swell and the next I found myself looking up through a translucent green-blue wall of water about to pound down on my head. Sometimes I got away without it breaking on me, but several times the top crested and I leaned into the wave, stuffed my blade into its face and prayed for the best. When waves crashed over me, I’d lose sight for a few seconds and emerge sliding sideways towards shore. Then I had to get out over the sand bar, paddle back away from the shore and do it all over again. Eventually, I just ferried into the wind. It slowed my progress, but it meant that I didn’t get pushed into shore.

                At the light, I took my time looking for a good landing site. Directly below the light several rows of pillings ran up against ragged, granite rock piles that were dumped there to stabilize the shoreline. The rock piles bulge out into the lake. On the rock pile’s east side, the waves seemed slightly calmer, but I passed that up to look on the west side. Directly west of the pilings, it seemed like the waves were stacking up on a shallow area, but just to the west of that, almost nothing was breaking until close to the beach. Somehow the shallow area and an offshore sandbar were combining to give me an easy landing. I waited for a break in the wave heights and sprinted in on the back of a few waves. Once I was in the break zone, I just road in the first wave that came in behind me. I didn’t even want to look back at how big it was for fear that it’d freak me out, so I didn’t.

                I lounged around the lighthouse, watched the lake calm down, cooked dinner and then launched out to paddle six miles to Little Lake Harbor. At sunset I reached the entrance to the harbor, which was so shallow that waves broke across it. I paddled through the breakers into the calm lake behind.

                A group of fishermen were sitting at a private dock behind a couple of cabins. One shouted out, “Calm down out there for you?”

                “It wasn’t too bad,” I said. “You been out today?”

                “Nooooo,” he said.

                “It was a bit rough,” I said.

                “I’d say,” he said.

At the marina, just a dock with a couple of metal-hulled fishing boats, I set up camp behind the only building, a 20-foot long metal shed. I crawled into my sleeping bag, thought about the strong winds I paddled in at the beginning of the trip and how today’s were stronger and I paddled further but didn’t really hurt. The wind hadn’t even concerned me that much. I was getting used to this. I fell asleep before I even turned off my headlamp.

                On day 33, the Grand Sable Banks, part of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, towered 300 feet overhead. The banks are parts of a sand dune system deposited by glacier over 10,000 years ago. Lake Superior has been cutting into the sand dunes since then and formed a steep sand bank. The scale is immense. It’s so large that I couldn’t comprehend the size until I saw a 20-foot tree hanging onto the side of the bank. It looked like a pebble momentarily suspended on the side of a skyscraper. The dunes were so large that it would take 17 sea kayaks stacked end to end to equal their height.

In the early settlement days, virgin forests covered the shores of Lake Superior and the dunes. Lumberjacks harvested the trees and transported them to a wooden log slide that ran down the side of the banks. At the bottom, they were rafted together and pulled by a barge to a nearby lumber mill. Legend has it that the friction and speed of a falling log could be so great that it could start the log chute on fire.[viii] The log chute is gone, but I paddled past where it had been and imagined logs speeding 300 feet down the banks.

When I landed for lunch, I ate lunch in the middle of a long beach. It seemed like I had paddled for hours along the sand. When I took the first couple of steps away from my kayak it startled me, because my steps sounded like I squished a frog. Every step on the hot sand was followed by a squeak.

                By late afternoon, I paddled under sheer sandstone palisades that rose 100 feet directly out of the lake. The walls wept water and red, blue, white and green mineral streaks painted its wet surface. In places the sandstone was worn into curves and arches. It looked like a sculptor had spent a lifetime creating art, but it was just the lake eroding the sandstone away. Around the next corner the cliffs reminded me of that when I found a recent rock fall in the lake with live trees tilted sideways but still with their leaves.

                Before I arrived at camp, I paddled under Spray Falls, a waterfall that spills over the sandstone cliffs and plunges 70 feet directly into Lake Superior. With the sun low in the west I saw a rainbow in the spray when I glanced back for a final look.

                At Chapel Beach, I met two kayakers out on a five-day trip. They were the first sea kayakers that I had met on the trip who were out camping. Katie, red-headed, kind with a fierce look in her eyes, had brought a six-pack of Alaskan Amber beer from Alaska for Eric’s birthday. Eric was a young, balding photographer and Katie was a tour boat guide. They invited me to watch the sunset and drink a beer. We sat on the shore and talked about kayaking and adventure. We cheered to both our trips.

                The trip became a blur of paddling after that night. I paddled almost dawn to dusk on the following four days. Along the way, I discovered sandstone caves on an island. Carved into the rock were names from the 1800s. I passed a deer that walked off the end of a point and swam into the lake. I experienced a seiche, a tide-like sloshing of water that raises and lowers the water level of the lake. I paddled past two freighters in the fog. Paddled into Big Bay, the first place on the trip that I had paddled before, and on the morning I left Big Bay, I paddled out into rain and wind into an area that I didn’t have any info about. I was paddling blind.

                Along the section from Big Bay to the Keweenaw Bay – the section I knew nothing about – the first 10 miles of shoreline consists of rounded headlands pushing out into Superior. When the headland receded, it protected a shallow sandy bay. On the headlands, cliffs of crumbly red rock rose from 20 to 50 feet high and made the only landings possible in the bays. After the first 10 miles, cliffs of the same rock extended unbroken for about 5 miles until the sand beaches at the mouth of the Huron River. After a short paddle along the beach, the cliffs continued unbroken until a point where Huron Bay narrowed to about 1 mile wide.

                I paddled close to shore for the first 15 miles watching the weather change from mist, to rain storm, to all-day long gray sky soaker. By noon, everything I owned was drenched. It even felt like my clothing under my drysuit was wet. I paddled past the Huron River and back into the section of cliffs. My original plans was to cross 4 miles across the widest part of the Huron Bay, but with the deteriorating weather, I decided to head into the bay and cross where it became approximately 2 miles wide. The peninsula separating Huron Bay from Keweenaw Bay would give me protection from the building waves, which were still coming out of the north. After the crossing the wind switched to the northeast.

                The crossing was uneventful, but I could tell that it was getting colder. My hands inside neoprene gloves and poogies were becoming stiff, and I felt the warmth draining out of me into the wet around me. I wanted to stop for the night, but the shoreline was rocky enough that I didn’t dare land in the waves. I decided to paddle around Point Abbaye between the point and its reef. I could see waves off to my right breaking a little under a mile away on the reef and when those waves hit the point, they reflected into a mess of peaks and valleys. I picked my way through getting colder and colder until finally I rounded the point and was able to surf on wind waves into protection of a rocky point.

                The shoreline consisted of rocky beaches or small cliffs and a dense forest came down to water’s edge. Without some serious bushwhacking, I wasn’t going to camp anywhere near here. The waters around me started to turn dark gray with the coming night and the shadows in the trees grew darker and I started shivering anytime I stopped for a break.

                After an hour of paddling, I noticed a sand beach in the distance. It looked like a perfect place to stop. As I got closer, I noticed a recently manicured lawn behind the beach, and then a two-story house with a covered porch that wrapped around two sides of the house. I landed anyway and went to the door and knocked. No one was home. Before exploring the neighborhood looking for someone who was around, I grabbed my cook kit and made a cup of soup protected from the cold rain by the porch. A thermometer on the house read 37 degrees Fahrenheit.

                After finishing the soup, the weather pressed around me with an increase in rain. Soon, I had hauled out my tent, set up on the porch and figured that the house was a weekend vacation home. No one would show up on the weekday. After setting up a dry camp, I broke out dinner and let the warm pasta warm me. Then I slept.

                In the morning, I loaded the kayak and pushed off under gray clouds with northeast side wind pushing waves down Keweenaw Bay parallel to my crossing. I decided to shorten the crossing my heading further into the bay along a shoreline of sand beaches and houses, but after a mile I was paddling next to 15- to 20-foot cliffs again. The cliffs were topped by houses. I couldn’t tell how far they extended and the chart showed nothing, so I bit the bullet and turned west for a 10 mile crossing to the southern entrance to Portage Canal, the canal that would take me to Houghton.

                The waves built higher in the middle of the crossing and soon I was riding up to the top of a wave, catching a view and then dropping. Instead of worrying about capsizing in the middle of a bay, I just plugged along forward. I thought back to the first 16-mile crossing and the second 10-mile crossing on this trip. On those I had worried, but now it just felt routine. After a few hours, I’d reach the other side. The weather and waves didn’t matter anymore. Up and down. Paddle. Paddle. Paddle.

                The lighthouse marking the end of the canal soon became visible as a white dot and then rising to the top of a wave, a multi-masted tall ship appeared directly in front of me. “How did I miss that?” I asked aloud.

                By late afternoon, I had paddled up the Portage Canal, rented a room at a hotel and purchased a ferry ticket to take me and my kayak to Isle Royale (pronounced royal), the largest island on Lake Superior, and an island only a few days paddle away from my home in Grand Marais, Minnesota. By reaching Houghton, I connected this trip to another and now had paddled the entire American shoreline of Lake Superior and Lake Huron, except for 20 miles on the Minnesota shoreline. After spending time on Isle Royale, I’d finish the remaining miles and paddle home.

                Isle Royale National Park is an archipelago of over 450 islands that was established as a park in 1940. It’s now a federally designated Wilderness Area, which means that human development is limited to development that “does not remain.” The main island is 9 miles wide and about 45 miles long. It’s the least visited national park in the continental United States and sees fewer than 20,000 visitors a year. I expected to see few people as I paddled the entire southern shoreline. After a full-day ride aboard the Ranger III, I arrived in Rock Harbor, the northern-most port just ahead of a two-day gale, which kept the ferries from traveling between the island and the mainland.

                Because ferries weren’t traveling and boat traffic hunkered down to ride out the gales, Rock Harbor, both its campground and lodge, filled up. The small restaurant on the island filled completely every night and all the three-sided shelters, free shelters in the campgrounds, filled. I found an open campsite and pitched a tent. I was antsy after the two days of waiting out the storm, and on the third day, cast off from Rock Harbor to a campsite 6 miles from the port on Little Caribou Island. I paddled along the mainland, which was a mix of cobblestone beaches and granite shore backed with a boreal forest of cedar, fur, birch and pine. On my left as I headed to the southwest was a set of long islands and reefs which kept the harbor I was in calm and protected.

                I checked out the two shelters at the Little Caribou Island campground, each was open to the wind, so I decided to set up a tent after I spent time at the old Rock Harbor Lighthouse, a lighthouse which was completed in 1856 and operated only a few years until 1879. After that it served as a place for camping parties and a residence in the early 1900s. Now it houses a park service museum.[ix] I paddled across the gap between the island I was on and Middle Island Passage. Out on the lake, the waves were steep and chaotic.

I landed near the old Edisen Fishery, a group of log buildings built in the early 1900s and used as a fishery. The park service allowed Peter and Laura Edisen to stay on after designating the area as part of the park. When I arrived, everything was locked up and the yards were in a disarray of decay. Boats were on the shore rotting, their white paint flaking off and it looked like a wind storm had blown boxes, tools and parts around.

Behind the Edisen Fishery I found a narrow path marked with a sign tacked into the ground with a rusty nail. It read, “Trail to Bangsund Cabin. Wolf-Moose Summer Headquarters and Moose Bones!” I followed it into the fir forest, pushing spider webs out of the way as I walked. Every 30 or so yards, I came across a small, yellow tag nailed into the ground marking different interpretive sites, such as snow shoe hare, wolf and moose scat, a aspen dropped by a beaver in 1973, birch bark which was noted as making a good canoe, sandstone embedded within basalt, and peltigera, a lichen that fixes atmospheric nitrogen, but when I reached the one labeled, “You are now halfway” I burst out laughing.

The next big sign marked a gravesite. Under two skulls and crossbones and a cartoon gravestone labeled “RIP” it read:

12-20 miners are reputed to be buried here, killed in drunken brawl between mining camps in 1850s. Original picket fence had names on each slat.

Knowing that someone was pulling my leg, I wandered closer to an old log cabin. As I closed on the door, about to knock, a silver-haired woman wearing a bright red shirt appeared from around the corner. She said, “Hi, I’m Carolyn. Rolf is out back giving a tour. Do you like hot chocolate?”

“Yes,” I said and walked to an area behind the cabin. Twenty to thirty-foot long benches arranged in lines held hundreds of moose skulls and antlers. It felt eerie, but the pointing antler protrusions created a chaotic but interesting pattern to look at – almost like a sea under a storm. Rolf, with a graying beard and hair wearing a baggy, loose, wool, button-up shirt and purple-blue crocs was giving a tour to a family of three and one park official. I had stumbled upon Biologist Rolf Peterson, who for 37 years headed the Isle Royale Wolf and Moose Study, which is the longest running study of any wild animal in the world.

After hearing about the moose skulls, collected from wolf-killed or otherwise dead moose throughout the years, we all went to the cabin. Carolyn presented a plate of brownies and cake and cups of hot chocolate for everyone. I sat down in a chair next to the wood burning stove and commented how warm it felt.

“It’s like an old friend on a cold day,” said Carolyn. It did. Sitting there, next to the radiating heat, was the warmest I’d felt in days.

It turned out that instead of one park official, I was sitting down with two. One was part of the Isle Royale hierarchy and the other was visiting. It sounded like he had taken a new post in Acadia National Park in Maine where he hoped to finish his career. Carolyn seemed to dominate the conversation and everyone, including myself, was gripped as she told her story of sustainability, about raising a family on the island in a cabin without running water, with the only power coming from wind generators and solar panels. She told us about how she enjoys getting water from the lake each day and understanding that they could only use electronics or watch a movie on their laptops after the sun shined or the wind blew enough to store enough power to do so. She also talked about sustainability and how Isle Royale was trying to heal itself after mining, logging and the developments of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

At the end of our visit just after the park service folks left, Carolyn gave me a copy of her book and signed it, and we chatted about the Grand Marais area. It’s hard to explain, but somehow the visit seemed to top my trip. It came at just the right moment. I had been paddling for 40 days. I spent most of those nights in a tent, eating simply and living simply. All that mattered was the daily routine of eating, map reading and paddling; as I neared the end of my trip, I was thinking about going back to my real life and family. I didn’t know if I learned anything from the trip, if it would change me, how I would readjust to home life and Carolyn’s message of simplicity resonated.

                I was thinking about simplicity when I paddled back to my campsite and found two boats docked at the campground dock. Both shelters were taken, but I had planned on using my tent anyway. I set up my tent and spent some time chatting with the crew of one of the boats. After awhile of chatting, he invited me to dinner.

                Dinner was fresh Lake Trout, green peas and noodles, followed with a Guinness and a sweet chocolate desert that they tried to pawn off on me. They had ate too much of the homemade desert during their annual boating trip to Isle Royale. I was happy to eat the remaining squares.

                The pitter-patter of non-stop rain woke me the following morning, and I dressed into my paddling clothing in the tent before getting out. While standing in the rain, I packed my kayak and paddled away after saying goodbye to the boaters that invited me to dinner. The winds had shifted to the northwest and although I watched the trees on top of the islands hills sway back and forth, next to the sloping basalt cliffs that were covered with orange and green lichen the water was mirror calm. As I paddled every now and then a wide crack in or steep outcropping of basalt broke the gently sloping cliffs. Between the cliffs and basalt, cobblestone beaches provide a place to land. Some of the beaches had uniform gray rocks the size of a soccer ball. On others the rocks varied in size from a golf ball to a basket ball size.

                I ate lunch on a cobblestone beach with fist-sized stones. The chart marked the beach as an old mine, but all I could see behind the beach was a swampy forest of birch and furs. During lunch, I had to swat at the constant buzz of black flies and mosquitoes. To save my sanity, I walked around the beach keeping the bugs just one step behind me.

                I was happy to leave the beach and by late afternoon, I arrived at a campsite on the north shore of Siskiwit Bay. As the sun set, I watched three moose walk along the bay’s edge, sticking their heads under water and swishing them around, then raising their heads and snorting. Even from my campsite over 100 yards away, I could hear the crying-like snort.

                I spent another day paddling down the south shore of Isle Royale and a night at Windigo before deciding to take a ferry across to Grand Portage instead of doing a 16-mile crossing. I felt ready to reach home and I was only two days away. Doing the crossing would have kept me away from home for another day.

                Once in Minnesota, I used the phone to hatch a plan to have pizza delivered to my tent. I would meet my girlfriend and a large pizza at Paradise Beach at 8 o’clock. After I got on the water and looked at the chart, I realized that my estimate was off. Instead of a short paddle, I faced a 23 mile paddle. It was 3:30, so I tried my cell phone, which I knew wouldn’t get a signal until Paradise Beach. Nothing. I paddled hard, but only arrived on the beach at 9pm. Shortly after, I noticed someone walking down the darkened sandy beach. She was walking next to the birch and fur at the beaches end. As she neared, I saw that she carried a six-pack of beer and a cold pizza. We celebrated my arrival.

                The next day, I packed up my kayak. Launched into familiar waters and paddled to Grand Marais. I had no plans to meet anyone at the landing. My girlfriend had to work, so I had no fanfare. After 45 days and 800 miles, I entered the harbor and decided to tour the harbor before ending my trip. I turned right and paddled along the breakwater and then next to the rocky shoreline covered with orange lichen. I paddled past the white and starkly rectangular Coast Guard buildings, past the harbor park and its sandy beaches.  A few families were standing on the beach throwing stones into the water. Town looked the same as when I had left. Then I paddled past cedar-covered buildings and fish houses of the marina until I arrived at the boat ramp.

                I pulled my boat ashore, smiled and asked a passing couple to take my picture. After posing for a picture and telling the story of my trip to the couple, I walked three blocks to my house and my journey was over. By the end, it all felt routine and my fears in the beginning had become unfounded.

References

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[i] United States Environmental Protection Agency: Saginaw River and Bay Area of Concern, http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/aoc/sagrivr.html

[ii] Butts, Edward, Guiding Lights Tragic Shadows, Holt: Thunder Bay Press, 2005

[iii] Butts, Edward, Guiding Lights Tragic Shadows, Holt: Thunder Bay Press, 2005

[iv] Charity Island: History, http://www.charityisland.net/history.html

[v] Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary: About, http://thunderbay.noaa.gov/about/welcome.html

[vi] Dennis, Jerry, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2003

[vii] Stonehouse, Frederick, Lake Superior’s Shipwreck Coast, Marquette: Avery Color Studios, 1994

[viii] U.S. National Park Service: Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore Scenic Sites, http://www.nps.gov/piro/planyourvisit/scenicsites.htm

[ix] United States Library of Congress: Rock Harbor Lighthouse, Copper Harbor vicinity, Keweenaw, MI, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/mi0346/