Day 14 Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Tawas Bay

I rowed ashore after a good night's sleep and a lazy breakfast. This bay is beautifully calm. At the marina I found some boats that have owners with a love of pigs that possibly exceeds my own:

I headed to the Tawas Point State Park. The light house looked very pretty but there were several school buses of kids waiting to climb it, so I decided to skip this one.

The Sandy Hook nature path starts at the light house and leads you to the spit and back, and it was really beautiful and peaceful.
This place is beloved by birders, there's apparently a big number of local and migratory birds using this as a home or a station during their journeys. I saw plenty birds and heard even more, and then I came across some conservationists/biologists putting up little fences around the nest of an extremely rare bird, called the Piping Plover.

There are only a few hundred of those tiny birds left. Their habitat is unfortunately being invaded by people and their dogs. I hope they can be saved and brought back from the brink of extinction.

I walked back through a massive campground that was at this time only harboring two dozen or so campers, but I can imagine this being a zoo at the top of the season here. It was interesting to see the different vehicles people used, from simple tents to massive Class A Motorhomes and everything in between. Some day I plan to get a nice Motorhome with my Admiral (then General) and tour the United States, maybe even Canada and Mexico.

I returned to the Caprice for lunch and then rowed towards East Tawas town, about 2.5 miles away. I had planned to go ashore somewhere along the way, but found that the whole shoreline was private property. Many very beautiful cottages and summer homes here, almost all of them still deserted. I ended up rowing all the way to town, The dinghy, when it floats right side up, is great to row, and since there was little wind and practically no waves it was delightful.

East Tawas town wasn't much to write home about, I strolled the main shopping street which was almost empty and many stores closed, and then found a supermarket that had those tasty smoked sausages I had found before. And then I rowed back to the Caprice to work on something and cook dinner.

My work was to rewire the bilge pump to use the float switch again. At some point in the past I had removed the float switch to use the bilge pump manually, the idea being that this way I could see how much water actually was seeping into the Caprice. But since I'm planning to leave the Caprice parked in Port Huron, possibly unattended  in the water for 6 weeks, I needed the auto-pump back.
The Caprice bilge is much too deep to reach the bottom by hand, so I needed to fabricate some wooden bracket thingy that put the pump and the float switch together. Good I have all kinds of tools with me and some scrap wood. Looks as if it works well.