Pentwater, MI

Originally posted at www.svsweetescape.com

Yesterday, Thursday we had intended to sail the 35 miles north to Pentwater but we found ourselves stuck in White Lake because of a series of showers and thunderstorms that were coming across Lake Michigan, one after the other from Wisconsin.  So we hung out on Sweet Escape, read and watched TV.  We did not leave the boat although we could have, we just didn’t feel like it.  Dinner was steak on the grill with a salad and mashed potatoes.

This morning after breakfast and running the generator for an hour to recharge some of our electronic devices, we weighed anchor and with Judy at the helm, headed north.  Once out on Lake Michigan we found an offshore breeze of about six to ten knots.  We raised our sails and motor sailed for awhile because there wasn’t enough breeze to make sailing worthwhile until about halfway when the winds picked up to 12 to 17 knots.  At that point we turned the engine off and had a great sail the rest of the way to Pentwater.  We entered Pentwater Lake and anchored in about 35 feet of water.  Having eaten little today we were both hungry so we made chili-cheese dogs for dinner.

Pentwater is an interesting town.  It is clearly a tourism community with the mandatory t-shirt shops and antique stores but it also a community that caters to boaters in general and cruisers in particular.  It’s waterfront consists of marinas, and nautical themed restaurants and bars along with a chandlery.  We put our dinghy in the water and went in and landed at the town’s dinghy dock.  We had brought our dirty laundry in and we left it in the dinghy so that we could scope the place out and look for a laundromat.  We found one, a block away, on the waterfront across the street from a little Italian grocery store and deli.

We are finding out that in this lifestyle simple tasks like shopping and doing laundry requires careful planning and strategery.  For example, once we were familiar with the lay of the land so to speak, we went back to the dinghy and grabbed our bag of dirty clothes and then walked back to the laundromat and Judy started two loads of wash while Brian supervised.  While they were washing we used the time to go for ice cream.  After that, we went back to the laundromat, Judy put the clothes in the dryer while Brian supervised.  When the clothes were done we made yet another trip to the dinghy, this time to deliver the clean clothes and then made our way back to the grocery store for some shopping.

We delivered everything out to Sweet Escape which was swinging at anchor out in the lake just in front of the town’s waterfront.  Nothing got wet and nothing fell in the lake.  Not even us.

As I write this out in our cockpit, dark has fallen and the lake is very still.  There is little breeze and it still has to be near 90 degrees outside.  A large, dark orange full moon is rising over the lake and boats and people in dinghies occasionally motor by, their red and green running lights reflecting off the still water.