Sailing

(Thank you, Christopher Cross, for singing about my greatest passion)

This is the Toledo Light in western Lake Erie, which I have sailed around many times. It sits outside of Toledo Harbor.

Fort Gratiot Lighthouse sits on Lake Huron, just north of Port Huron, Michigan. She has seen many Port Huron to Mackinac races.

The J.T.Wing was the last schooner to sail the Great Lakes. Here she is sailing under the Bluewater Bridge which connects Port Huron, Michigan, USA with Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. When she was decommissioned from sailing, she was used as a maritime museum on Belle Isle, an island in the Detroit River. Years later, she was deemed unsafe and condemned. She was given a proper demise on November 4, 1956 by burning her under the watchful eye of the Detroit Fire Department and the U.S. Coast Guard. I was among the 6,000 people witnessing that historic event.

This is Skillagalee Island Light on the island of Ile Aux Galets which lies near the shipping channel approach to the Straits of Mackinac in northern Lake Michigan. Michigan has a rich and multi-cultured heritage -- one of them being French. Ile Au Galets is French for Island of Pebbles, which is a good description of this low lying island, rising only a few feet above the water level. "Skillagalee" is the Anglosized convolution of the French name.

When I first started sailing, a "friend" of mine gave me a book to read, thinking that I would either fall in love with sailing or have the wits scared out of me. The book was Fastnet, Force 10 and it was about a tragic race from Cowes, England, around Fastnet Rock, off the coast of Ireland, and back again, in 1979. It was a race where 15 sailors lost their lives, 19 boats were abandoned and 5 boats sank. "Force 10" is a wind blowing at 48-55 knots -- a full gale. It was one of the world's worst sailing disasters during something that was supposed to have been fun, in a competitive sort of way.

This is West Quoddy Lighthouse in Maine, near the Bay of Fundy -- where the greatest differences between ebb and flood occur. It's also home to that great past time of whale watching.

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