We're Cruisers Now

Originally published at www.svsweetescape.com

We have been dealing with a problem involving our new Raymarine e7 chart-plotter for the past two weeks.  Racine Riverside from whom we bought it and also who installed it has been working hard to get the thing to communicate with our older Raymarine instruments (wind, depth, speed, auto pilot) but we have had an intermittent problem where the plotter which operates on SeaTalk NG, a new proprietary Raymarine communications protocol doesn't always communicate with the other instruments which operate on an earlier form of SeaTalk.  This appears to be a software issue and Tech Scott from Riverside was by bright and early this morning to finish up working on the plotter.  Once finished at about 9:00 A.M. and after an admonition from Scott that, “if anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen out there”, we slipped the lines and after a brief stop at the fuel dock, Sweet Escape said goodbye to Wisconsin and headed east.  

We had a pleasantly uneventful and sunny crossing with no flies and no bad weather.  There was a two foot swell from the southeast.  Judy made chicken salad sandwiches for lunch and the auto pilot did all the steering.  The plotter functioned perfectly today, we’ll see how it goes tomorrow.   It is an awesome unit - when it works. 

As I write this we are anchored in front of the White Lake Yacht Club along the south shore of White Lake, Michigan.   There is little wind and a near full moon is shimmering off the lake.  It is very serene and quiet here.  We made brats on the grill tonight for supper and attempted to watch some of the Olympics but the signal kept dropping out.  There is nothing else on that interests us so we have turned the TV off for the night.

Tomorrow, weather permitting,  we plan to head for Pentwater where we will anchor in Pentwater Lake. We will then put the dinghy in the water and go into town and take a look around.

We know that this was only a crossing of Lake Michigan but as of today we are finally full time live aboard cruisers and we feel like Columbus must have felt when he arrived in the new world.  We could not be happier.