Day 6 Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Frankfort to Northport

No photos today, which is a shame because the Sleeping Bear Dunes are very impressive when it's not foggy. As it was, soon after leaving Frankfort I was in increasingly dense fog, Sailing was great though, as long as I had the wind and waves not straight on my tail.
Going through the Manitou Passage I knew that there was some commercial traffic in the passage, as I saw one of them on AIS, and heard him talking to another captain on VHF. I couldn't see or hear a thing however, and carefully kept at the extreme right of the passage. I had played with the thought of anchoring at South Manitou island, but it would have been too dangerous to cross traffic in this visibility.
The autopilot started misbehaving all of a sudden, over correcting my course. I took his cover off, expecting the usual problem with a pulley that likes to jump off one of the wheels occasionally. This time the pulley was all right, so I was initially stumped and put its cover back. It's kind of hard to diagnose the thing while out sailing in fog, but eventually I decided to look it over again when I got bored steering by hand. This time I realized that a sliding contraption on the main puller/pusher bar was very loose. After tightening its screw the autopilot was working very well again. Come to think of it, maybe it would have worked better the day before when the spinnaker drove me to distraction.
Weather was getting increasingly nasty, more and more rain, and eventually started getting through to me even under the bimini and dodger. I called Northport marina on the phone to advise them of my arrival, but got an answering machine only. Navionics and GPS really saved my bacon, because for several hours I saw nothing around me at all. On my way into Traverse Bay I passed one buoy with a bell at a distance of less than 100 yards but only heard its bell. Another buoy I almost ran over, I only saw it as I passed it at 10 yard distance.
Arriving at Northport the weather momentarily cleared, but I found the marina deserted. Not wanting to dock by myself without any idea where I should berth, I exited the marina and anchored outside. Soon the fog returned.