April 24, 2024 • 16 mins
Jibe talking does some interviews with fellow members during the 2023 Commodore Ball. This episode we sit down with Clayton Greenbaum and Andrea Dorsten as they talk about their exciting experience of sailing from the Jolly Sailing Club to the Apostle Islands. Listen in and hear about this exciting journey!
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(00:00):
Don't worry about it.
(00:00):
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Well, good evening.
Another edition of, well you can just edit all this in.
Anyways, tonight we have a special guest.
I'm pretty excited actually.
We have a member who had quite an extensive
sailing trip this summer and we all watched it
via Facebook and first of all,
(00:21):
go ahead and introduce yourself.
Hi, my name is Clayton Greenbaum.
So I joined Jolly Roger Sailing Club last summer
and I sailed over 400 miles on the western end of Lake Erie
and then decided I wanted to one up that
and this summer I sailed from Toledo
to the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin.
Well, I always wanted to go there.
(00:42):
Now come on, tell me about the Apostle Islands.
Was it worth it?
It was pretty cool.
So one thing, when I was getting close to the Apostle Islands,
people started to warn me that if I sailed there,
my boat would never leave the Apostle Islands
and I was actually trying to make it through
the Apostle Islands to Duluth
and so their prophecy came true, at least for this year
and next year I'm gonna go back and try to sail my boat
out of the Apostle Islands but it is so beautiful
(01:04):
and it's like a sailing paradise.
There's just all these little islands
and bays you can go to and stuff you can explore.
I'm gonna try to sail around a little bit
but then get out of there and see if I can break
that prophecy.
Now, was this all by yourself?
Yeah, it was all single-handed until I got
to the Apostle Islands and then my girlfriend, Andrea,
came up and joined me.
Oh, does Andrea sail?
(01:24):
For a little bit, yeah, she did this summer.
We should have put an extra mic on her.
Yeah, we get an extra mic.
Do you have an extra mic?
If you talk close enough.
All right, would you mind if we talk to you also?
Yeah, you have to lean over and talk to his chest.
Anytime I can get a good woman to do that,
we got it made.
All right, anyways, so you did sail with Clayton this summer.
(01:47):
Yes, I sailed with Clayton this summer.
My name is Andrea Dorsten.
I actually sailed on a little 22 when I was probably
12 years old and Clayton brought me back to sailing.
So it's been great.
So you have a little experience.
This wasn't a first time thing.
Not a first time thing.
She probably has more experience than I do, honestly.
(02:08):
I don't know now.
Although, I'm a little bit of a liar, buddy.
So how long did it take you to get from here
to the Apostle Islands?
So I think it was about 14 days of sailing.
Some of those days were, the longest day was 43 hours long.
So 14 of those days and it was 40 days total.
So the rest of the time I was kind of just in ports
(02:30):
messing around, exploring stuff.
And then about 14 days on the water moving.
Now I'm gonna get back to Andrea in a second,
but I wanna ask you, there was some incident.
You were talking about being on some break wall
or something and you didn't have anywhere to be
or you couldn't go into port.
And by the way, if you can tell, this is a live session.
(02:54):
We have people coming in asking for pliers.
We have people talking about phones.
Anyways, but you said there were freighters coming in
and out and they were creating such big waves.
They were smashing you against the wall.
Did I get that right?
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, so the town was called St. Clair Harbor
and there's a little road and there's a bridge
(03:15):
that goes over the river going up into the harbor.
And the guide, from what I understood, said the bridge
would operate like 24 hours.
You just have to call in and they would open the bridge.
So I got there in the middle of the night.
I don't know, it was like between two and four a.m.,
something like that.
And nobody was there.
So I kept hailing the bridge and I went up to the bridge
(03:36):
and I couldn't see anybody there and kind of looking around
and yelling and tied up to the wall and like walked around
and didn't see anybody.
Paced around.
Paced around, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I couldn't get in there and I have an electric motor
on my boat so I had used up,
because I was going up the St. Clair River.
Which I hear has a little bit of current.
(03:57):
Yeah, a lot of current on the St. Clair.
So I'd used up most of my battery getting to this bridge
and I'd kind of run out of options.
So I didn't have enough power left in the batteries
to keep motoring all night.
But I also couldn't like anchor in the river
because there was a lot of freighter traffic coming through.
That would be terrifying.
Yeah, so.
They make big wakes.
(04:19):
Yeah, they're not as big as you would think.
Somehow they do something to mitigate the wakes.
But when you're close to the break,
like the river wall, the wake comes in,
bounces off the wall and it kind of like doubles the wake.
So the wake coming in from the freighter
and then the wake reflecting off the wall add together
(04:40):
make the wake twice as big.
That does not sound good.
Yeah, yeah.
So what I had to do was just tie up to the wall
until I saw a freighter coming.
And then I would have to wait until it was pretty close
and then untie from the wall and push off
and stay in the river while the wake was passing.
And it would take 15 or 20 minutes for the wake
(05:00):
to kind of die down.
And then I would tie against the wall again.
Well, how did you get back to the wall
without drifting off if your motor wasn't running?
So I had enough energy in my battery
to like motor off of the wall
and stay out in the river for a little bit
and then tie back up to the wall.
But I couldn't just stay in the river all night.
Okay, that sounds like quite an adventure.
(05:21):
It was an adventure, it was fun.
So did you get any damage on your boat from there?
No.
Hitting the wall and stuff?
No, the first time a freighter went by,
I tried to see how long I could stay tied up to the wall
and the boat started kind of hitting the wall pretty hard
and you could hear the fiberglass kind of making some noises.
Yeah, that's not a good noise.
Yeah, so then I kind of threw the lines off
(05:43):
and pushed off the wall as hard as I could
and tried to motor it away.
So you said last summer and this summer both,
you had extensive sailing.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, so I started sailing in 2020.
Oh my gosh, you just started and you took that long of a trip?
Yeah, so-
I like you, you're a daredevil.
Yeah, my goal is to take a bigger trip every year
than I did the previous year kind of.
(06:04):
So in 2020, I just learned sailing
because I'm into sustainable transportation and stuff
and I thought it'd be a pretty cool thing to do.
And then in 21, I raced a little bit in Columbus
on Allen Creek and then in 22,
I decided I wanted to buy a boat.
So I found a boat up here at Jolly Roger,
bought it from a guy and then sailed around
(06:27):
the Western end of Lake Erie, did all those miles,
ended up getting the Decker Award,
which I didn't know was a thing.
I just, Phil said, hey, submit your log book and I did
and then I won an award, so that was cool.
And then this year, kind of tried to do something
even bigger, so next year, I think I'll probably try
to do like 2000 miles.
So this year I did a little over a thousand
(06:48):
getting up to the Apostle Islands.
So Andrea, you joined him in the Apostle Islands.
Now, how did you get there?
Oh, you can get that if you want.
I drove, actually.
I was his transport back after he left the boat
in the Apostle Islands.
Okay.
So it was actually my birthday trip.
I spoiled my birthday, Clayton was going to come back
(07:11):
and see me and I said, no, I'd rather just go
to the Apostle Islands, because that's been on my list.
So drove up, took a few days, sailed around,
went through Devil's Island and tooled around
all of the Apostle Islands, loaded his bike, my bike,
and everything into my tiny little car
(07:34):
and brought him back home.
So how long did you sail around with him
in the Apostle Islands?
I think it was four days.
So yeah, a full four days just visiting each
of the islands that we could.
Now, are there marinas there or do you just anchor?
We did both.
(07:55):
So there is a marina there.
We met a lot of very cool people,
some of who stay the full summer on the marina
and go out sailing themselves.
But we also had a few overnights where we just set anchor
and slept under the stars.
That just sounds absolutely fantastic.
(08:16):
Yeah, I've read about the Apostle Islands.
Go ahead.
Yeah, all the marinas are on the mainland of Wisconsin.
There aren't any on the islands.
So whenever you're out on the islands,
sometimes there would just be like a little pier
or sometimes there's not even that.
You kind of just have to like throw out anchor.
So how far from the mainland are the islands?
They're pretty close.
(08:38):
It's like a cluster of islands.
I'm not sure how many there are,
more than a dozen probably.
Yeah, I know there's a lot.
I don't know, okay.
The closest ones are only a couple hundred feet
from the mainland.
Oh my word.
And there's a regular ferry that goes from one
that's populated and has a few restaurants on it and stuff.
Most of the others don't have much more
than Lighthouse and some trails.
So would you say all of them are within 10 miles
(08:59):
from the mainland?
Yeah, I think so.
The farthest ones out might be a little bit further
than that, yeah.
But they're all clustered really close.
And I think that's one of the things that makes it
such a popular sailing destination.
Inside the islands, you're pretty sheltered
from the lake and stuff.
And you have all these different places to go,
all these little bays and things.
(09:19):
Now, are all of these in US waters?
Yeah.
So can you go on all the islands
or are there any protected ones
they don't allow you to step foot on?
No, we could go on each one of them.
So the furthest one out is Devil's Island.
It's called Devil's Island because the native people who
live there thought that when the wind would come through the sea
(09:42):
caves, the sound of the wind sounded like devils
or evil spirits.
So there's a lot of sea caves out there then to explore?
Yeah, a couple.
I know on Devil's Island, there are a lot of sea caves.
I think on some of the other islands,
there might be a couple.
But I think Devil's Island is the big place for the sea
caves.
Had you been to either one of you been there before?
(10:04):
No.
No, I had not.
Would you go back?
I'll go back next summer.
Yeah.
Why you?
I'm hoping to.
Now, you live down towards Columbus, right?
Yeah.
Now, are you down towards Columbus also?
No, I live in Toledo.
OK, so you live in Toledo.
OK, all right.
All right.
And this is the first time you've
(10:25):
been sailing since you were a little kid
or had you been sailing all along?
No, I haven't been sailing all along.
I do like to spend a lot of time out on Lake Erie,
but it's mostly been kayaking.
OK, OK.
That sounds like work.
Sounds like work, the kayaking.
How was it going up the Detroit River?
I heard that's kind of a nightmare.
Is it?
(10:45):
I thought it was really cool going up the Detroit River.
There were a few incidents.
So when I first got into the river, it was dark.
And there was a lot of seagrass in the river.
OK.
Or whatever you call it.
And I was trying to stay out of the channel
because I hadn't spent a lot of time around freighters.
And I wasn't sure what the wake would
(11:05):
be like or how it was navigating around them.
So I tried to stay out of the main channel.
And because of that, I got stuck in this seagrass.
And it kept clogging up the prop on my motor.
All right.
So every five minutes, I had to pop the motor out
and get this seagrass out of it and put it back and keep going.
There's quite a bit of current in the river too.
I heard somebody said something like six miles an hour.
(11:27):
I mean, I don't know.
That might be wrong.
Yeah.
In the Detroit River, I don't think it's that fast.
The fastest place is when you're going under the Blue Water
Bridge headed into Lake Huron.
That's on the St. Clair River.
There's a section there called the rapids.
And it's like a little over 1,000 feet, maybe 1,500 feet
long, where the currents are like six to eight miles an hour.
(11:49):
Oh.
Yeah.
It's like rapids.
The water is.
So do you have to use your sail and your motor
to get through there or what?
I think I have my main up.
Yeah.
It wasn't helping much because there
wasn't much wind that day.
But I just had the motor going 100%.
And everybody at Jolly Roger said,
(12:09):
stay on the Canadian side when you go through
and stay really close to the shore.
So I tried to follow that advice.
And I was about like 50 feet away from the shore.
And I wasn't making any progress.
So I had to get even closer.
And eventually, I was about 10 feet away from the shore.
And I was getting really scared because this water is kind
of really rushing through there.
(12:30):
And if you would lose control of the boat,
you're going to get washed up onto the rocks on the shore
or something.
But it was fun because I was moving so slow.
There's a park there on the Canadian side.
And there are these Canadians in the park.
And I was kind of having conversations with them.
So they were sitting on benches.
And I was moving so slowly that I would wave to them.
And they would wave back at me.
(12:51):
And then we would start talking about stuff.
The same one 20 times, right?
Forward, back, forward, back.
It felt like it, yeah.
So, wow, that sounds, that's,
now you have, this boat is 22 feet, right?
Yes, Catalina 22.
So earlier tonight, we had somebody talking about
how they wouldn't go on the lake with a 22.
Now you just heard from Clayton that he went all the way
to the Apostle Islands on a 22.
(13:13):
So I crossed all of Lake Huron and most of Lake Superior
and a little part of Lake Erie.
Now I've heard that a really nice place to go is Isle Royale.
Is that near where you were at all?
Do you know about that place?
Yeah, that was kind of on my list of places
to visit this summer,
but I didn't have enough time to get there.
It's on the other side of the lake.
So it's pretty close to Canada.
That's in Minnesota, right?
It is in Minnesota.
(13:34):
It's like, it's really close to Canada.
That's on my bucket list.
It's on the north side of the lake.
I heard that's pretty remote and pretty cool.
It is.
I've heard it's the most revisited national park.
So the people that go there like to go back,
but it's one of the least visited
because it's so remote and so hard to visit.
I heard they got wolves sign there
and moose sign there.
I guess it'd be wolves, not wolves.
But anyways, what?
(13:55):
Yeah, I've heard that same stuff too.
But you can only get there by boat
if here doesn't know what Isle Royale.
It's in Lake Superior, right?
Yes.
And I think it's about, if I remember reading,
I think if you take a ferry,
it's like four hours or something.
I mean, it takes a while
even if you just take a ferry to get over there.
I think most of the ferries leave out
of Copper Harbor in Michigan.
(14:16):
Yeah. Okay.
And they go across,
and it's a pretty long stretch across the lake.
Okay.
And it's not close.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen stuff online
and stuff about it.
And my kids always wanted to go there and camp.
But when you start talking to wild wolf and wild moose,
I'm like, I don't think so.
I don't think I'd want to camp there.
So I hear all this stuff about moose or meese
(14:37):
or whatever you call them,
but I've never- Moose?
Yeah.
I've never seen one.
And I don't believe they're real
because I go to these places
where they're supposed to be moose,
like Maine or the upper peninsula.
You've never seen one?
I've never seen one.
So I think everybody's just kind of like lying to me.
It's like a conspiracy to sell t-shirts or something.
Maybe.
Yeah.
(14:58):
Sorry. I saw one on my drive up to see.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Okay, here we go.
We can't have couples fight here.
Wait, you saw one on the drive?
This is not Caramo or anything like that right now.
Okay.
You saw one?
I saw one just on the very tip of Wisconsin
sometime in the middle of the night.
My eyes might've been deceiving me,
but pretty sure I saw one across the street in front of me.
(15:24):
That was probably one of the youpers up there or something.
That was one of the animatronic moose that they have
to make people believe that moose are real.
That's the locals.
They plant these moose.
I never thought about that.
Tourists will see them and buy the t-shirts.
Oh, all right.
Well, you never know.
Anything else exciting you guys would like to tell us
about this trip?
I mean, I think it sounds fantastic.
(15:45):
I appreciate you sharing with us about it.
I mean, it makes me want to go and do this,
but if I went, I'd have to go by myself
because there's no way my wife's going on the boat
for 14 days.
Well, you didn't either.
No, only four.
And we didn't hate each other at the end of it.
We still like each other.
If my wife listens to this, they still liked each other.
(16:06):
Now we went over to Cedar Point once, eight hours,
and that was enough.
That was enough.
In the boat?
Yeah, it was enough.
Eight hours at Cedar Point.
Yeah, that's about right.
You gotta know your own limits.
Yeah, I agree, and I never do.
That's the problem.
Well, I want to thank both of you
for talking to me tonight, and have a good time.
All right, Ted, thank you so much.
That was awesome, thanks.
Don't worry about it.
(00:00):
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Well, good evening.
Another edition of, well you can just edit all this in.
Anyways, tonight we have a special guest.
I'm pretty excited actually.
We have a member who had quite an extensive
sailing trip this summer and we all watched it
via Facebook and first of all,
(00:21):
go ahead and introduce yourself.
Hi, my name is Clayton Greenbaum.
So I joined Jolly Roger Sailing Club last summer
and I sailed over 400 miles on the western end of Lake Erie
and then decided I wanted to one up that
and this summer I sailed from Toledo
to the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin.
Well, I always wanted to go there.
(00:42):
Now come on, tell me about the Apostle Islands.
Was it worth it?
It was pretty cool.
So one thing, when I was getting close to the Apostle Islands,
people started to warn me that if I sailed there,
my boat would never leave the Apostle Islands
and I was actually trying to make it through
the Apostle Islands to Duluth
and so their prophecy came true, at least for this year
and next year I'm gonna go back and try to sail my boat
out of the Apostle Islands but it is so beautiful
(01:04):
and it's like a sailing paradise.
There's just all these little islands
and bays you can go to and stuff you can explore.
I'm gonna try to sail around a little bit
but then get out of there and see if I can break
that prophecy.
Now, was this all by yourself?
Yeah, it was all single-handed until I got
to the Apostle Islands and then my girlfriend, Andrea,
came up and joined me.
Oh, does Andrea sail?
(01:24):
For a little bit, yeah, she did this summer.
We should have put an extra mic on her.
Yeah, we get an extra mic.
Do you have an extra mic?
If you talk close enough.
All right, would you mind if we talk to you also?
Yeah, you have to lean over and talk to his chest.
Anytime I can get a good woman to do that,
we got it made.
All right, anyways, so you did sail with Clayton this summer.
(01:47):
Yes, I sailed with Clayton this summer.
My name is Andrea Dorsten.
I actually sailed on a little 22 when I was probably
12 years old and Clayton brought me back to sailing.
So it's been great.
So you have a little experience.
This wasn't a first time thing.
Not a first time thing.
She probably has more experience than I do, honestly.
(02:08):
I don't know now.
Although, I'm a little bit of a liar, buddy.
So how long did it take you to get from here
to the Apostle Islands?
So I think it was about 14 days of sailing.
Some of those days were, the longest day was 43 hours long.
So 14 of those days and it was 40 days total.
So the rest of the time I was kind of just in ports
(02:30):
messing around, exploring stuff.
And then about 14 days on the water moving.
Now I'm gonna get back to Andrea in a second,
but I wanna ask you, there was some incident.
You were talking about being on some break wall
or something and you didn't have anywhere to be
or you couldn't go into port.
And by the way, if you can tell, this is a live session.
(02:54):
We have people coming in asking for pliers.
We have people talking about phones.
Anyways, but you said there were freighters coming in
and out and they were creating such big waves.
They were smashing you against the wall.
Did I get that right?
Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah, so the town was called St. Clair Harbor
and there's a little road and there's a bridge
(03:15):
that goes over the river going up into the harbor.
And the guide, from what I understood, said the bridge
would operate like 24 hours.
You just have to call in and they would open the bridge.
So I got there in the middle of the night.
I don't know, it was like between two and four a.m.,
something like that.
And nobody was there.
So I kept hailing the bridge and I went up to the bridge
(03:36):
and I couldn't see anybody there and kind of looking around
and yelling and tied up to the wall and like walked around
and didn't see anybody.
Paced around.
Paced around, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I couldn't get in there and I have an electric motor
on my boat so I had used up,
because I was going up the St. Clair River.
Which I hear has a little bit of current.
(03:57):
Yeah, a lot of current on the St. Clair.
So I'd used up most of my battery getting to this bridge
and I'd kind of run out of options.
So I didn't have enough power left in the batteries
to keep motoring all night.
But I also couldn't like anchor in the river
because there was a lot of freighter traffic coming through.
That would be terrifying.
Yeah, so.
They make big wakes.
(04:19):
Yeah, they're not as big as you would think.
Somehow they do something to mitigate the wakes.
But when you're close to the break,
like the river wall, the wake comes in,
bounces off the wall and it kind of like doubles the wake.
So the wake coming in from the freighter
and then the wake reflecting off the wall add together
(04:40):
make the wake twice as big.
That does not sound good.
Yeah, yeah.
So what I had to do was just tie up to the wall
until I saw a freighter coming.
And then I would have to wait until it was pretty close
and then untie from the wall and push off
and stay in the river while the wake was passing.
And it would take 15 or 20 minutes for the wake
(05:00):
to kind of die down.
And then I would tie against the wall again.
Well, how did you get back to the wall
without drifting off if your motor wasn't running?
So I had enough energy in my battery
to like motor off of the wall
and stay out in the river for a little bit
and then tie back up to the wall.
But I couldn't just stay in the river all night.
Okay, that sounds like quite an adventure.
(05:21):
It was an adventure, it was fun.
So did you get any damage on your boat from there?
No.
Hitting the wall and stuff?
No, the first time a freighter went by,
I tried to see how long I could stay tied up to the wall
and the boat started kind of hitting the wall pretty hard
and you could hear the fiberglass kind of making some noises.
Yeah, that's not a good noise.
Yeah, so then I kind of threw the lines off
(05:43):
and pushed off the wall as hard as I could
and tried to motor it away.
So you said last summer and this summer both,
you had extensive sailing.
Is that what you said?
Yeah, so I started sailing in 2020.
Oh my gosh, you just started and you took that long of a trip?
Yeah, so-
I like you, you're a daredevil.
Yeah, my goal is to take a bigger trip every year
than I did the previous year kind of.
(06:04):
So in 2020, I just learned sailing
because I'm into sustainable transportation and stuff
and I thought it'd be a pretty cool thing to do.
And then in 21, I raced a little bit in Columbus
on Allen Creek and then in 22,
I decided I wanted to buy a boat.
So I found a boat up here at Jolly Roger,
bought it from a guy and then sailed around
(06:27):
the Western end of Lake Erie, did all those miles,
ended up getting the Decker Award,
which I didn't know was a thing.
I just, Phil said, hey, submit your log book and I did
and then I won an award, so that was cool.
And then this year, kind of tried to do something
even bigger, so next year, I think I'll probably try
to do like 2000 miles.
So this year I did a little over a thousand
(06:48):
getting up to the Apostle Islands.
So Andrea, you joined him in the Apostle Islands.
Now, how did you get there?
Oh, you can get that if you want.
I drove, actually.
I was his transport back after he left the boat
in the Apostle Islands.
Okay.
So it was actually my birthday trip.
I spoiled my birthday, Clayton was going to come back
(07:11):
and see me and I said, no, I'd rather just go
to the Apostle Islands, because that's been on my list.
So drove up, took a few days, sailed around,
went through Devil's Island and tooled around
all of the Apostle Islands, loaded his bike, my bike,
and everything into my tiny little car
(07:34):
and brought him back home.
So how long did you sail around with him
in the Apostle Islands?
I think it was four days.
So yeah, a full four days just visiting each
of the islands that we could.
Now, are there marinas there or do you just anchor?
We did both.
(07:55):
So there is a marina there.
We met a lot of very cool people,
some of who stay the full summer on the marina
and go out sailing themselves.
But we also had a few overnights where we just set anchor
and slept under the stars.
That just sounds absolutely fantastic.
(08:16):
Yeah, I've read about the Apostle Islands.
Go ahead.
Yeah, all the marinas are on the mainland of Wisconsin.
There aren't any on the islands.
So whenever you're out on the islands,
sometimes there would just be like a little pier
or sometimes there's not even that.
You kind of just have to like throw out anchor.
So how far from the mainland are the islands?
They're pretty close.
(08:38):
It's like a cluster of islands.
I'm not sure how many there are,
more than a dozen probably.
Yeah, I know there's a lot.
I don't know, okay.
The closest ones are only a couple hundred feet
from the mainland.
Oh my word.
And there's a regular ferry that goes from one
that's populated and has a few restaurants on it and stuff.
Most of the others don't have much more
than Lighthouse and some trails.
So would you say all of them are within 10 miles
(08:59):
from the mainland?
Yeah, I think so.
The farthest ones out might be a little bit further
than that, yeah.
But they're all clustered really close.
And I think that's one of the things that makes it
such a popular sailing destination.
Inside the islands, you're pretty sheltered
from the lake and stuff.
And you have all these different places to go,
all these little bays and things.
(09:19):
Now, are all of these in US waters?
Yeah.
So can you go on all the islands
or are there any protected ones
they don't allow you to step foot on?
No, we could go on each one of them.
So the furthest one out is Devil's Island.
It's called Devil's Island because the native people who
live there thought that when the wind would come through the sea
(09:42):
caves, the sound of the wind sounded like devils
or evil spirits.
So there's a lot of sea caves out there then to explore?
Yeah, a couple.
I know on Devil's Island, there are a lot of sea caves.
I think on some of the other islands,
there might be a couple.
But I think Devil's Island is the big place for the sea
caves.
Had you been to either one of you been there before?
(10:04):
No.
No, I had not.
Would you go back?
I'll go back next summer.
Yeah.
Why you?
I'm hoping to.
Now, you live down towards Columbus, right?
Yeah.
Now, are you down towards Columbus also?
No, I live in Toledo.
OK, so you live in Toledo.
OK, all right.
All right.
And this is the first time you've
(10:25):
been sailing since you were a little kid
or had you been sailing all along?
No, I haven't been sailing all along.
I do like to spend a lot of time out on Lake Erie,
but it's mostly been kayaking.
OK, OK.
That sounds like work.
Sounds like work, the kayaking.
How was it going up the Detroit River?
I heard that's kind of a nightmare.
Is it?
(10:45):
I thought it was really cool going up the Detroit River.
There were a few incidents.
So when I first got into the river, it was dark.
And there was a lot of seagrass in the river.
OK.
Or whatever you call it.
And I was trying to stay out of the channel
because I hadn't spent a lot of time around freighters.
And I wasn't sure what the wake would
(11:05):
be like or how it was navigating around them.
So I tried to stay out of the main channel.
And because of that, I got stuck in this seagrass.
And it kept clogging up the prop on my motor.
All right.
So every five minutes, I had to pop the motor out
and get this seagrass out of it and put it back and keep going.
There's quite a bit of current in the river too.
I heard somebody said something like six miles an hour.
(11:27):
I mean, I don't know.
That might be wrong.
Yeah.
In the Detroit River, I don't think it's that fast.
The fastest place is when you're going under the Blue Water
Bridge headed into Lake Huron.
That's on the St. Clair River.
There's a section there called the rapids.
And it's like a little over 1,000 feet, maybe 1,500 feet
long, where the currents are like six to eight miles an hour.
(11:49):
Oh.
Yeah.
It's like rapids.
The water is.
So do you have to use your sail and your motor
to get through there or what?
I think I have my main up.
Yeah.
It wasn't helping much because there
wasn't much wind that day.
But I just had the motor going 100%.
And everybody at Jolly Roger said,
(12:09):
stay on the Canadian side when you go through
and stay really close to the shore.
So I tried to follow that advice.
And I was about like 50 feet away from the shore.
And I wasn't making any progress.
So I had to get even closer.
And eventually, I was about 10 feet away from the shore.
And I was getting really scared because this water is kind
of really rushing through there.
(12:30):
And if you would lose control of the boat,
you're going to get washed up onto the rocks on the shore
or something.
But it was fun because I was moving so slow.
There's a park there on the Canadian side.
And there are these Canadians in the park.
And I was kind of having conversations with them.
So they were sitting on benches.
And I was moving so slowly that I would wave to them.
And they would wave back at me.
(12:51):
And then we would start talking about stuff.
The same one 20 times, right?
Forward, back, forward, back.
It felt like it, yeah.
So, wow, that sounds, that's,
now you have, this boat is 22 feet, right?
Yes, Catalina 22.
So earlier tonight, we had somebody talking about
how they wouldn't go on the lake with a 22.
Now you just heard from Clayton that he went all the way
to the Apostle Islands on a 22.
(13:13):
So I crossed all of Lake Huron and most of Lake Superior
and a little part of Lake Erie.
Now I've heard that a really nice place to go is Isle Royale.
Is that near where you were at all?
Do you know about that place?
Yeah, that was kind of on my list of places
to visit this summer,
but I didn't have enough time to get there.
It's on the other side of the lake.
So it's pretty close to Canada.
That's in Minnesota, right?
It is in Minnesota.
(13:34):
It's like, it's really close to Canada.
That's on my bucket list.
It's on the north side of the lake.
I heard that's pretty remote and pretty cool.
It is.
I've heard it's the most revisited national park.
So the people that go there like to go back,
but it's one of the least visited
because it's so remote and so hard to visit.
I heard they got wolves sign there
and moose sign there.
I guess it'd be wolves, not wolves.
But anyways, what?
(13:55):
Yeah, I've heard that same stuff too.
But you can only get there by boat
if here doesn't know what Isle Royale.
It's in Lake Superior, right?
Yes.
And I think it's about, if I remember reading,
I think if you take a ferry,
it's like four hours or something.
I mean, it takes a while
even if you just take a ferry to get over there.
I think most of the ferries leave out
of Copper Harbor in Michigan.
(14:16):
Yeah. Okay.
And they go across,
and it's a pretty long stretch across the lake.
Okay.
And it's not close.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen stuff online
and stuff about it.
And my kids always wanted to go there and camp.
But when you start talking to wild wolf and wild moose,
I'm like, I don't think so.
I don't think I'd want to camp there.
So I hear all this stuff about moose or meese
(14:37):
or whatever you call them,
but I've never- Moose?
Yeah.
I've never seen one.
And I don't believe they're real
because I go to these places
where they're supposed to be moose,
like Maine or the upper peninsula.
You've never seen one?
I've never seen one.
So I think everybody's just kind of like lying to me.
It's like a conspiracy to sell t-shirts or something.
Maybe.
Yeah.
(14:58):
Sorry. I saw one on my drive up to see.
I don't believe it.
I don't believe it.
Okay, here we go.
We can't have couples fight here.
Wait, you saw one on the drive?
This is not Caramo or anything like that right now.
Okay.
You saw one?
I saw one just on the very tip of Wisconsin
sometime in the middle of the night.
My eyes might've been deceiving me,
but pretty sure I saw one across the street in front of me.
(15:24):
That was probably one of the youpers up there or something.
That was one of the animatronic moose that they have
to make people believe that moose are real.
That's the locals.
They plant these moose.
I never thought about that.
Tourists will see them and buy the t-shirts.
Oh, all right.
Well, you never know.
Anything else exciting you guys would like to tell us
about this trip?
I mean, I think it sounds fantastic.
(15:45):
I appreciate you sharing with us about it.
I mean, it makes me want to go and do this,
but if I went, I'd have to go by myself
because there's no way my wife's going on the boat
for 14 days.
Well, you didn't either.
No, only four.
And we didn't hate each other at the end of it.
We still like each other.
If my wife listens to this, they still liked each other.
(16:06):
Now we went over to Cedar Point once, eight hours,
and that was enough.
That was enough.
In the boat?
Yeah, it was enough.
Eight hours at Cedar Point.
Yeah, that's about right.
You gotta know your own limits.
Yeah, I agree, and I never do.
That's the problem.
Well, I want to thank both of you
for talking to me tonight, and have a good time.
All right, Ted, thank you so much.
That was awesome, thanks.
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