 Lake Michigan at our feet…. We are underway on the western shore of Lake Michigan, and we feel amazing and free. Free of the prison that was the boatyard. Free of the halfway house that was our slip at the yard. We couldn’t wait to go, and go we did. Wednesday morning, August 27 at 8:11AM, I started a new logbook on the new Stinkpot—a DeFever 44 Offshore Cruiser built in 1982. She is hull #8—full of charm, full of quirks, and still needing lots of work to correct years of unqualified repairs and “upgrades,” many of which were clearly undertaken by professionals who should’ve known better. We honestly had no idea when we were going to be ready to go. We still had our venerable 2006 Toyota Highlander Hybrid, Trebek—I never was one to name cars, but Stacey always has, and she insisted I give the car a name after we purchased it eleven years ago. Being a Highlander, my mind drifted to the cast of the movie of the same name. I started thinking about Sean Connery, and my favorite Sean Connery moment—which wasn’t one—was Darrell Hammond’s impersonation of him on SNL’s Celebrity Jeopardy skits. I loved the way he (Hammond) churlishly uttered “Trebek.” I named the car. A week ago, feeling our departure was imminent, Stacey listed our steed on Marketplace and was so overwhelmed with the response, we were glad when the perfect buyer was among the 15 or so replies that came in during the first 120 seconds the ad was up. The buyers came immediately to look at the car. They loved it and put down $100, agreeing to let us hang onto it until we were ready to cast off, at which point they’d return to collect the car and give us the balance. Tuesday morning, we messaged them, and by nightfall Logan, a brilliant 17-year-old, had his first car to cart him back and forth to school. Wednesday morning, we’d be gone.  Trebek, wearing its new, sporty Michigan plate. The moment we’d been waiting for, that took eight weeks of blood, sweat, and tears, had arrived. Our first stop on our way out of the yard was at the fuel dock to pump out our waste tank and bring aboard 119.25 gallons of diesel at an eye-watering $4.299 per gallon. We paid for the fuel and settled up for our slip fees, then backed Stinkpot into the fairway and toward the great unknown. I say “Stinkpot,” but in reality the transom still bore her previous name and hailing port, Terrapin • Detroit, MI--carefully and tastefully lettered. This, a clear violation of protocol, had to stand out of necessity. The Coast Guard had not completed our documentation paperwork before we launched on August 5th, so I was not comfortable making the change while it would’ve been easy—on land! I figured I’d just handle it in the boat slip when the documents came through or at a later stop if it continued to take what was already excessive time for them to turn it around. The paperwork finally came through in mid-August (we applied on July 7), but the boat was constantly bouncing around in the slip due to a localized seiche from the Macatawa Inlet. So it waited. And waited. Ultimately, we got underway with the wrong name and hailing port on the boat because doing anything else would’ve been unsafe. How do you choose between completely unsafe and mildly illegal? Our first day saw us cruising north, first to Grand Haven where we thought we’d anchor on Spring Lake for a couple nights to allow Lake Michigan’s forecasted sporty conditions on Thursday to play out without us. But, arriving at 12:30PM to the U.S. 31 Drawbridge, being waved off until the 1:30PM opening (the bridge doesn’t open during the lunch rush), and then the bridge malfunctioning at 1:30PM preventing an opening, we returned to the building seas on Lake Michigan to run to the next inlet: Muskegon. It was a lovely cruising day and the boat operated well on her first outing, despite her crew’s learning curve with her systems. Once on Muskegon Lake, we anchored near Heritage Landing. Any other time in our future, we might’ve deigned to crane our dinghy overboard and take a run to town to explore, but not this time. The dinghy is still in the process of being prepared for such adventure, and I have not yet been able to source the impeller kit for its 15hp Mercury outboard. Suffice it to say, for the time being we are only getting ashore by docking Stinkpot. Not ideal, but it is what it is. As I noted, Thursday was to be a “no-go” day due to predicted NW winds and their accompanying 5–6 footers, so we settled in for some quiet time. I had hoped the anchorage would be settled enough to deal with the lettering on the transom, which had already confused a high-speed ferry captain in the inlet who saw us as Stinkpot on AIS but hailed us by the lettered name and felt compelled to tell us of the discrepancy. He liked the story and congratulated us on the purchase. It was settled enough, but by the time we were, I was tired enough to put the job off, figuring the next morning would do. The next morning we awoke to find ourselves within near spitting distance of a mid-sized cruise ship, the French-flagged Le Champlain. Shocking as it was to see such a large vessel that close (nearly 1000 feet away), it was fun to see, and we were clearly not in the way of the dock. The winds began to kick up almost immediately after our coffee was enjoyed, so the transom lettering was again back-burnered. We settled in for a day on the hook which was far more enjoyable and comfortable than it ever would’ve been on the previous Stinkpot. We passed the time enjoying our new space, doing odd jobs about the boat, and I put in about five or six hours working on Argo business. Late in the day, we heard Le Champlain make a securité call and watched as she gracefully glided off the dock, turned 90° and made for the inlet out onto Lake Michigan. We then dined on the riches of the freezer. As we were turning in, I walked out on deck and noted that the cruise ship berth was once again filled—this time by the far less imposing, Marshall Islands-flagged Pearl Mist, which was still in port as we weighed anchor Friday morning. Once again underway, our order of business was the fuel dock at the nearby Safe Harbor marina—a place with the second-lowest listed diesel price on Lake Michigan. Once there, we greedily gobbled up an additional 389.14 gallons at $3.509 per gallon, taking the boat to nearly full according to the fuel sight glasses before sliding back out the inlet and continuing our northward trek. Friday’s cruise finished at the oldest continuously operating yacht club in Michigan on White Lake in Whitehall, MI. White Lake Yacht Club, founded in 1903, is a Yachting Clubs of America member club, which meant that our membership in the MTOA (Marine Trawler Owners Association) afforded us reciprocal privileges for dockage at a rate of $1.50 per foot. We tied up and our feet touched land for the first time in a couple days. We dined in the club, which was far from the white tablecloth affair one might associate with yacht club life—it was a snack bar and ice cream stand in the clubhouse run by teenagers. We still ate well considering the distinct lack of Michelin stars: me enjoying a barbecue chicken panini, Stacey polishing off a personal pizza, and we shared a vegetable and hummus platter and a side of waffle fries. For dessert, we each had a $2 “single scoop” of cloyingly sweet Cookie Bowl ice cream, which the teens packed so full we were bursting by the end. It wasn’t Sardi’s, but it somehow fit the place and moment perfectly. While at the yacht club, my first order of business—before addressing the lettering on the transom—was to sort out our GPS location issue with our electronics. Some device on this boat’s aging SeaTalk1 network was no longer working, and as a result most of our electronics aboard were no longer receiving GPS coordinates. This is not a good thing, so it needed immediate correction. I was hoping to use our new AIS unit for that, but could not easily figure out how to make it broadcast. Ultimately, I found a workaround using our PredictWind DataHub (a great network router as well as NMEA gateway and diagnostic tool) to broadcast location to the network, and now everything is once again working properly. I will sort out using the AIS for backup location (the vendor replied to our email that it should be possible with a couple simple steps), but that can now wait.
One thing became clear to us as we sat there at the dock: this club is not used to visitors like Stinkpot. We had a revolving door of people greeting us dockside just hoping to get a glimpse of the big boat on their doorstep. As darkness approached, we took an evening stroll, returning to the boat to turn in, again without addressing the lettering due to our exhaustion. I was awake with the dawn, and was shocked to find the boat cold. During the night, we had kicked both of the shore-side ELCI (equipment leakage circuit interrupter) breakers, which didn’t surprise me. Not only does Stinkpot still have some electrical gremlins that I’m chasing on the neutral buses, but the dock power pedestals were old, so despite newer breakers supplying them, old wire and connectors in a wet location are a recipe for ELCI trips. I reset the breakers ashore and made coffee, after which, still clad in my pajamas, I climbed down to the swim platform and finally removed Terrapin from the transom. By 10:30AM, after an amount of expletive use, the proper name, Stinkpot, appeared above a hailing port of “Portland, Maine.” She’s legal! After Stacey’s hasty renaming ritual right then as the engines were warming up, we dropped lines and made our way back onto Lake Michigan. The winds have changed here. Locals will tell you this is not normal for late August, but fall is certainly in the air. The nights are chilling down into the mid-40s, and the days are barely making 70°F, sometimes missing it by nearly 10°. The Great Lakes begin to become less dependable in the fall, and with safe harbors along either shore of the lake so far apart, it’s feeling like we should abandon our plans to cruise the lake. We had, after all, formed the plan when we thought we’d be underway much faster than necessity (and insurance) required of us. With such a late-in-the-season start, and chilly mornings offering a dose of coming reality, we made the decision early on that Saturday morning to abandon our plan to cruise all over Lake Michigan and start pointing south. With our new goal in mind, as we turned out the inlet back onto the big lake, we began retracing our steps. I set a course to Saugatuck, Michigan—a tourist and boating mecca of sorts. I knew that Labor Day Weekend would bring out lots of boaters. What I didn't realize was how tightly they would pack into a small, touristy port like Saugatuck—and I really didn't know that Saugatuck was such a popular boating destination. I guess I should've Googled it first because we arrived on Kalamazoo Lake to full anchorages, drunk party-goers on boats, and general aquatic mayhem. We spun on our heel and backtracked north about 12 miles to Lake Macatawa and anchored a couple miles from where this crazy journey started. This morning, coffee in hand, we weighed anchor and pointed the boat south toward the St. Joseph River where we are now docked on the free bulkhead. Where to from here? We don’t know, and now we have exactly the right boat to negotiate such an unpredictable, changeable lifestyle. She’s called Stinkpot!
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Rather than draw this out with an extensive blow-by-blow (that would include a wonderful visit by none other than Sean and Louise that you can read about here), I’ll just make it known here that we sold our Bayliner 3870 in Hopewell, Virginia shortly after the fuel tank replacements were completed. We bought a 1982 DeFever 44 Offshore Cruiser. She needed a lot of deferred maintenance but was in good shape otherwise. The two transactions were completed within a day of each other, meaning we only owned two boats for less than 24 hours. We rented a U-Haul, added a car trailer to carry our venerable Toyota with us, and on the afternoon of Saturday, June 21, 2025—after a day dockside in Hopewell moving the contents of the boat into the truck in near-three-digit temperatures—we took one last photo with the original Stinkpot.
We’ve now been in Holland, Michigan since Tuesday, June 24. We did make a detour to Georgia to pick up my piano from “the sitter’s house” (our dear friend Mike has been keeping it for me since we sold the house in Maine). The new Stinkpot required considerable attention before she was fit to launch, but the big splash happened at exactly 1 p.m. on Tuesday, August 5. Before that, we were living in Holland’s Microtel. As soon as she was floating, we moved aboard and began settling in. It has been a long journey, and there’s still a lot to get done, but we’re on target to hopefully drop lines within a week or two (tops). We are still “fitting” ourselves aboard, modifying the boat to suit our uses, and dealing with some egregious configuration issues—worst of which: the battery banks the previous owners had installed. Eight expensive Trojan T-105 (GC2) batteries were so poorly configured that had we gotten underway we’d have risked fire (at worst) or short battery life (at best). As of this writing, the worst of it is done—fire or shortened battery life will not happen—but we’ll have a much more electrically efficient system once I finish. After a week aboard, we’re getting comfortable. We brought our toaster/convection oven from the Bayliner and added it to the galley. I’ve swapped out all the galley appliances except the refrigerator: new convection microwave, new induction cooktop, new dishwasher. The (pricy) Force 10 marine range that came with the boat is now for sale (no reasonable offer refused). I’m updating and wiring the navigation electronics to achieve what I consider the minimum requirements. Soon, we’ll be selling our 2007 Toyota Highlander Hybrid (no reasonable offer—correction—no offer refused) and dropping lines. Where to? No firm plans. We’re going “out there” somewhere—ultimately heading down the western rivers for the winter. |
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