Cruising Through Canadian Waters

After a lovely few days of playing tourists in Put-in-Bay, we continued on our way. Just a few miles away was the Canadian border. This was exciting to us since we hadn’t been able to travel through Canada due to Bella not being able to receive vaccinations, but we’d still be able to technically enter Canada with her as we passed through. This is allowed and is referred to as an “innocent passage”, however, boaters must not touch Canadian waters as a boater as long as you do not touch any Canadian soil, anchor, moor, or come alongside any other boat.

We were excited to see a group of white pelicans as we crossed into Canadian waters. Many people don’t realize that the Great Lakes actually have pelicans, just a different variation of them. We’ve seen them in Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois!

As we drove through downtown Detroit, a friend that we had met along the Great Loop reached out and said that he could see us coming up the river.  He is a captain of the Detroit Princess, a 222’ river cruise boat that can hold up to 1900 passengers! He just so happened to be working that day and told us to look up to the top deck as we passed. He was standing outside waving and took a few photos of us cruising by and he even blew the horns for us! It was such a fun welcome back into our home state! After 3 years, we were finally back in Michigan with our boat again!

We made it as far as New Baltimore, Michigan that night before deciding to anchor. At this point, it really didn’t matter where we anchored since our dinghy motor still wasn’t working, meaning we couldn’t get to shore anyway.

Dustin had found a 15 hp Mercury motor for sale on Facebook Marketplace, but couldn’t seem to get ahold of the guy who had it listed. After a little reconnaissance, he managed to find a guy with the same name in the area and decided to take a chance and give him a call to see if he was the one with the motor for sale. To our delight, he called back and it was indeed the correct person!  We arranged a time for the man to bring the dinghy to the New Baltimore waterfront and were thrilled that he agreed to meet us since we didn’t have a vehicle. Dustin took the old motor off of our dinghy and left it on Trouvaille and then on our lunch break that day, we had to row the dinghy into shore and then walk about a mile each way to a bank to get cash for the new motor because the man didn’t have Venmo or PayPal.  Soon enough, the man showed up, and he assured us the motor worked, we paid him and then fitted the new (to us) motor on the dinghy. It started first pull and we were back in business! Our original motor was a 1989 15hp  2 stroke Mercury motor and we loved it because for 40 years, it was so reliable!  We decided to stay with 2 stroke for this reason, except the new motor was substantially newer, being a 2001! 

Happy to have our “car” back, we headed back to the boat for the rest of our workday. We had hoped to upgrade to a slightly larger motor, but were just happy to have it working again. Literally like an hour after we did this deal, a 20 hp Mercury 2 stroke motor popped up for sale on Marketplace in the same town. We were a little bummed that we had missed out on this larger motor, until Dustin read at the bottom of the listing that the person who had this posted for sale was interested in trading for a smaller motor of the same vintage!  We had literally just bought the motor he was interested in! Dustin reached out to the man right away and within a couple of hours, he was back up on shore doing another deal. They each tested out the motors and came to an agreement to simply swap motors.  The man wanted a smaller motor that was easier to lift by himself, and we wanted a more powerful motor so that we could plane out with 4 people in the dinghy or when it is loaded down with groceries. Both parties left happy, but we definitely ended up on the better side of the deal! We essentially paid $700 for a $2200 motor that day and now, our new motor is so much more powerful. I joked with Dustin the first time I drove it and said I feel like I need to wear a helmet while driving it!

Unfortunately, while we were in New Baltimore, Dustin lost all of his video footage from the entire Erie Canal and up to this point in the trip. He had been trying to transfer files from his phone to his computer and then to external hard drive, and somewhere along the line, the transfer failed and erased his footage. This was devastating to us because it is the one thing that cannot be replaced. We couldn't go back and recreate those times and it left a huge gap in our content for the blog and our Facebook page. It took quite awhile to get remotivated after that happened because filming videos and organizing everything and editing them in sequence takes a lot of time, and it was all just suddenly gone!

New Baltimore is a cute little town though so we walked into town and found a cute little distillery called Tashmoo Distilling and had a drink to try and cheer up. They even let us bring Bella in with us and they catered to the boaters by having a drink named after the Great Loop.

The water in Lake St. Clair is ridiculously clear! It felt like we were down in the Keys or something by looking at the color of the water! The bugs there, however, were some of the worst we've ever experienced. Our boat was absolutely covered in Mayflies (which the locals call Fish Flies) and another smaller type of insect called Caddisflies. It was completely disgusting! Every morning, we had to get up and use our 5 gallon bucket to dump lake water all over our boat to clear the bugs off of it. If this wasn't motivation to finally install a washdown system for the decks, I don't know what is!

The next day, we received a message on our blog from a couple whose house we were anchored out in front of. They had Googled our boat name and wanted to tell us how much they liked our boat! They invited us to come up to the house for dinner one night to meet them and their friends and we all enjoyed some drinks and Mexican food! We had a great time and Jeff and Colleen are absolutely the sweetest couple! Colleen even baked us a loaf of banana bread and left it on the dock for us to come pick up before we took off the next day. It was such a fun, spontaneous way to make new friends and we are so glad they got ahold of us!