Our First Shake Down Sailing Trip and Update

We rigged all our sails, went food shopping, stored everything securely, checked the weather and found a weather window to head out on our first shake down sail! YAY

Ready to go.

Nick saw that some “interesting” weather would be encountered, as far as waves! Wind gust to 25 mph, wave heights to 8’….Let’s be ready, he said…

The Great Lakes are no force to be reckoned with for sure, he’s been telling me for years!!!

Be very respectful of the Great Lakes, they are very different from an ocean!

They can be very grumpy, very confused waters, he always says!

Well, lets take this weather window and see how far we can go, Mackinac Island is the goal, he said! 👏🏻😉

We ended up having a beautiful 14 hour sail , heading at 30°! Winds out of the N at 10 knots, a very beautiful and pleasant sail…that lasted about an hour! 😮🤣

After a complete lull , the winds clocked, in typical Great Lakes style, set in and hammered us!

Fortunately we pulled down the jib and the main sail during the lull which brought our speed down to 1.1 knots under foresail alone.

And then the winds started howling from the SE, gusting to 30 knots ! 😮 wow, what a ride!! Heavy rolling and yawing due to the short, steep killer waves.

We heard two distress calls that were resolved safely by our wonderful USCG.👍🏻

We saw some bronze colored dust under our steering system, and to play it safe, we pulled into a Marina at 0200 hours to assess any possible damage.

Although we planned our first shake down sail to Mackinac Island, 200 miles north, we stopped short at about 50 miles in on our first day.

We can call this first shake down sail a success as far as all systems are concerned, they are working well. Yay.

The steering will be inspected today by Nick while moored and living and loving our boat life 🥰.

Stay tuned

8hrs Later Update: tightened the worm gear double nut to take the slack out. Replaced an o-ring on the engine throttle body. Happy we brought the jumbo wrench set and the o-ring kit!