We really have no idea anymore what day it is, so we gave up and now call everyday Blursday. After we left the Charlevoix marina we headed east into Lake Charlevoix to anchor for several days in Oyster Bay. It’s a very protected area with nice lake homes dotting the shores and wooded with pine trees. It feels like being up north somewhere in Minnesota. In this area of the lake there is no place to go ashore since it is all private homes.

While we were here on anchor, it quite literally rained for 3 days solid, or so it seemed.

It started out with just a cloudy, foggy sort of day as we made our way into Lake Charlevoix and into Oyster Bay. Here are some photos from along the way.

We spent 3 days looking for things to keep us busy on the boat in the rain. I must say we very much appreciate the enclosure for the cockpit as it really gives us a whole additional room in the boat and allows us to sit in the cockpit even while it is raining. Otherwise we would have to sit down below in the boat and really can’t see what is happening outside.

I did some yoga on the front deck when it wasn’t raining, we spent some time doing fill it in books and puzzles. We also do “normal stuff” that you all do everyday such as make the bed, pick up the “house”, do some cooking, etc. However we probably do some stuff that you all don’t do everyday such as watch our anchor alarm to make sure we aren’t moving and we are staying where we intend to. Zip up the enclosure, unzip the enclosure, open the hatches, close the hatches, etc.

One of the things that is a bit different is how we store things and how we have to play “Jenga” to move things to get to other things. As a result, anything we do on the boat takes twice as long. As an example, Mark thought he would make me a bracelet out of paracord to pass the time. The items he needed to do this are stored under our bed. This requires moving all the things from under the bed, opening the compartment, finding the container that the paracord is stored in and getting it out and then reversing all these steps to put it back. It looks something like this:

Here’s Mark hard at work making me a bracelet. Thanks honey! And a picture of the final product!

One evening we were grilling up some hamburgers and sitting in the cockpit and saw what appeared to be a person moving quickly across the water while standing up. This looked really weird, like how was he doing that? There was no sail like a wind surfer, there was no motorized sound, he wasn’t being towed by something. This is something we have never seen before. As he came closer to our boat we were able to get some photos of him. It looks like a motorized surf board but perhaps with an electric motor since it was virtually silent. Here’s what he looked like and our hamburgers, yum!

The next day was more rain and laying around. We have had quite a cribbage tournament going over several days. I have been kicking Mark’s butt at cribbage.

With all the rain and no sunshine our solar panels are not producing much electricity to put back into our battery bank. We have 600 amp hours of battery bank (6 group 27 AGM batteries) for the house bank. We can use about 300 amp hours of the battery bank and we are have currently used about 160 amp hours from our battery bank, so we like to get them recharged and back to a more full state. In order to charge our batteries, we can do that in a number of ways. 1) run the engine 2) run the generator 3) solar panels 4) wind generator. Right now due to the weather 3 & 4 are not options, no wind and no sunshine. We decided to run the generator for bit and recharge our batteries.

Running the generator snowballed into checking it out and then changing the oil since Mark was already in there. Again, we play boat “Jenga” since everything that we store in our cockpit lockers (lazarettes) has to be removed to get underneath the cockpit where our generator lives. The cockpit lockers are rather large and here are all our worldly possessions removed to change the generator oil.

Literally no one can move until everything is put back in it’s place.

Most of the time, I am sure all you dear readers think that this is what we are doing on this sailing trip:

But, here is what we are really doing:

I also made some chocolate chip cookies one afternoon. I was hoping the dry heat from the oven would help get rid of the dampness that has over taken the boat and everything we own. The cookies were delicious!

Finally on the morning that we left Oyster Bay, it was nice enough to show you what a beautiful anchorage this is: