The Slates.
There is something in us that wants to sail. Even though a sailboat might seem like an anachronism in an age when air travel has made going anywhere you want a thing to be measured more by inconvenience than adventure. Then again, maybe that’s reason enough.
The opportunity for me came in an email from a friend. He quoted Herman Melville: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
My friend had a line on chartering a sturdy 40-foot sloop named the Frodo. He proposed that a group of us set sail for the Slate Islands in the far northern reaches of Lake Superior.
There are people who can tie eight different kinds of knots and tell you the name of every line descending from rigging of a sailboat. They’ll take you deep into the art of sailing. I am not one of those people. My perspective is that of one used to keeping both feet on dry land. This would be only my second time venturing onto the wild waters of Lake Superior.
The Frodo was a good boat to do it in. The boat was built in Finland, with a wide beam and deep, heavy keel to hold her own on the Baltic Sea. She’s not new, built early in the 1980s. But she has an authentic teak deck and nicely polished appointments in the cabins. Me, I’ll take a weathered deck as a good sign that the boat and body of water are well enough acquainted to remain on friendly terms throughout my voyage.
Five of us motored out of Thunder Bay at precisely 8:27 on day one, hoping to cover half of the roughly 100 miles to the Slate Islands on our first leg. The high cliffs on the Canadian shore are remote and rugged, and I never got tired of watching the scenery drift by. The wind had yet to make an appearance. The Frodo’s big diesel chugged away, making a steady 5.2 knots.
Running the motor is not the highlight of a sailing adventure. It feels like you’re on a tractor plowing water. So it was grins all around when the wind finally stirred off our Starboard bow. We made ready to sail.
Even in relatively light winds the process of raising the sail on a big boat gets the pulse going. You turn straight into the wind, and for a few heartbeats all is chaos. There are a lot of physics going on. The sails snap in the wind. The boom fights to break loose. Then one last tug on the halyard brings the sail to the top of the Frodo’s tall mast. It seems like it takes longer than it actually does, then it’s time to fall away from the wind and regain control of the boat. We unfurl the Genoa — the oversized jib sail attached to the front of the mast — and feel the strong pull as the sails take the Frodo forward.
This is the moment, each time you experience it, that you understand exactly what’s so good about sailing. The artificial rumble of the motor is gone. The ropes creak as they tighten against the power of the wind. Seven knots. Then seven-point-four. Wind, waves and boat connect like a single living thing, and riding at the center of it all is you.
Day two showed us the wilder side of the world’s biggest freshwater lake. First came an icy wind blowing off the huge expanse of deep, frigid water, straight toward our bow. The rest of the country was experiencing a massive July heat wave, but I came on deck dressed for November. Wool socks, thermal shirt, a heavy polar fleece, wind- and waterproof shell, and a knit hat up top. Wearing everything I had in my duffel felt about right.
This was our crossing day. An 86° compass heading would take us straight over the big water to the Slate Islands. The wind shifted just enough to make a close-hauled sail possible. This is the point of sail where the mainsail and Genoa are set tight to the boat. If you get it right the sails mimic the aerodynamics of an airplane wing, pulling the boat forward into the wind. If you get it wrong and point the bow too directly into the wind you’re “in the irons.” The sails luff uselessly and the rudder loses all power to steer. Bill, the most experienced sailor of our group of friends, did a fair amount of eyeballing and fine-tuning. Then declared the sails set.
Being on deck in big water when the wind starts blowing is a thrill ride. The wind speed hit 25 knots, and the Frodo dipped her bow under some waves. If being on top was exhilarating, going below to look for another layer of clothing or grab something from the galley was another experience entirely. It’s like stepping inside a cement mixer. Your internal gyroscope goes haywire. There are handholds everywhere, and you need them as you get tossed about by the pitching cabin. All of us came away with a few bumps and bruises from the rough crossing. Perhaps more alarming, Bill, the aforementioned experienced sailor and our captain for the voyage, ended up leaning over the side and sending his breakfast to Davy Jones Locker.
As if the winds and waves weren’t enough, the Frodo hit a bank of fog just short of the islands. We kept a wary eye on both the water ahead and the big compass positioned near the wheel. Just as it began to feel seriously creepy seeing nothing but gray in every direction, two points of land emerged out of the fog. They marked the entrance to the large interior bay of the Slate Islands. Somehow, we’d managed to keep the Frodo straight on course through everything Superior had thrown at us.
Day three dawned with the water mirror smooth. We spent the next two nights anchored in McGreevy Harbor, deep in the interior of the Slates. Then a third night just around the southeastern tip of the arpeggio in a rocky bay named Patterson Harbor. The surrounding days we had free to explore the Slate Islands. I’ve never seen anything quite like them. Rugged sea cliffs preside over pristine bays and inlets. There is a large herd of woodland caribou. We managed to spot just one, but it made for a majestic sight picking its way along a secluded cove.
The most striking feature of the Slate Islands is their remoteness. By any normal means of conveyance, you are quite simply a long ways from anywhere. The sum total of our encounters with humanity is as follows. Two men working at a lighthouse. A young couple camped on an island. A delightful 86-year-old woman who makes a habit of visiting the Slate Islands every year in her pretty white yacht. A small group of researchers studying the caribou. There can’t be too many other places left on Earth where you have such a vast and stunning natural treasure virtually to yourself.
Wednesday we began making our way back towards the Canadian mainland. The winds were directly to our stern, which is not an easy point of sail. Even a slight shift in the wind can cause the boom to jibe unpredictably and knock an unwary sailor over the side. We rigged a spar to hold the head sail out to Port, and a boom preventer to hold the main sail safely out to the Starboard, and sailed wing-and-wing to our next anchorage at Woodbine Harbor. According to the notes penciled on the Frodo’s charts, Woodbine is a favorite of previous visitors. The opinion was seconded by The Bonnie. That’s what we called the thick spiral-bound book that guided our comings and goings. The book’s real name is The Superior Way, written by a longtime sailor named Bonnie Dahl who spent decades cruising Lake Superior and discovering its secrets. The Bonnie was our bible for finding the best anchorages and threading our way through the teeth of the rocks that guard them. Woodbine Harbor proved to be as gorgeous as promised. Once there we picked up a fresh cargo of biting flies and mosquitoes, which I spent the next night in my berth battling with a rolled up magazine.
On a sailboat you are either looking for wind, or dealing with too much of it. That makes sailing a perfect metaphor for life, which rarely comes at a person in even measures. Solid little philosophical nuggets like this come easily on a sailing voyage. In some part this is due to the unique level of focus you have on a sailboat. It’s just dangerous enough that the mind is always engaged. The other part is that humanity has been at it for so long. As one of our group put it, “What I love about a boat is that everything has a purpose and a lot of them go back hundreds of years. People have gotten this figured out for us.”
In a sense, what we were doing wasn’t that different from what Henry Thoreau did when he set off to live in his cabin on Walden Pond. It was a voyage of self-reliance and spiritual discovery. Like Thoreau we were living deliberately, with only the supplies we had carried with us. Although, in full disclosure, our stock of wine and good whiskey well exceeded Thoreau’s theory of living simply. And there is this difference: if you’re not paying attention, Lake Superior will kill you a lot more quickly than Walden Pond.
We got the full spectrum of wind conditions on our last full day of sailing, from the moment we weighed anchor in Woodbine Harbor. The day began with alternating bands of bright sunshine with zero wind, then thick fog with zero visibility. One long blast on the foghorn followed by two short ones is the proper signal for a boat making way under sail.
By late morning the fog lifted for good and the wind began to blow hard, straight at our bow. No sailboat can make headway directly into the wind, so the answer is to tack. That means sailing at an angle to the direction you actually want to travel. We set a tacking course that would take us some five miles out into the open water, then come about and tack back towards the coast. Progress is made in a series of giant zigs and zags.
The wind hit fifteen knots and we put the first reef into the main sail. A reef folds the sail down toward the boom to reduce its size and power, like going from a V-8 to a six-cylinder engine in your car. We put the second reef in at twenty. Then the wind hit twenty-five knots and we reefed in the Genoa as far as it would go. After that all we could do was hang on, unless we wanted to find a sheltered cove to wait out the blow. That thought probably occurred to a few of us the final time we came about near the safety of the coast and began another tack back out toward the wild open water.
The waves came at the Frodo like a range of small mountains, and I scrambled for pills to calm the tempest rising in my stomach. I’m not sure which one worked. But luckily it didn’t take long before something did. The lesson learned on such as day is a simple one. Trust the boat. The Frodo had been across the Atlantic. She’s outfitted for racing. It’s liberating to replace the silent scream trying to grow in your brain with the idea that this is what the Frodo was built for. Then hang on and enjoy the ride.
A day hence from our wild lurch into Superior’s 25-knot headwind we would be re-entering a world with its own unsettling turbulence. We’d left behind the mixed-up summer of 2016 and its end-of-the-world vibe. It would all be waiting for us when we came back. But like I said, sailing brings you back different. The useful thing it taught me is that perhaps the only way a democratic society like ours can make progress is to tack, just like we were doing out on the lake. People can’t head straight into all the terrifying dislocation coming at them right now. So they point themselves out toward the deep, uncharted, crazy waters. Then, hopefully, come about and head back toward the coast before they lose sight of it entirely. In the age of sail you needed a strategy to get where you wanted to go, and most often it involved setting a course that veered in some unexpected opposite direction. That gave people a sort of wisdom we would all find useful today.
Before I had to worry about any of that, nature had one last phenomenon to show us. Lake Superior acts like a giant refrigerator, and for the past week this had kept an icy wind blowing across our bow. But as we approached our destination we came around a point and suddenly we were sailing into wind blowing across the mainland with its withering heat wave. It was the same 20-knot wind, but in the space of about a minute it went from beer cooler to blast furnace. One of our group has spent his career managing wildlife preserves. Even he was astonished at the magnitude of what Mother Nature had just pulled off.
Along with the strange hot wind blowing out of Thunder Bay came my first cellphone signal in a while, and it was time to start noticing the things missed during eight days off the grid. I missed 527 emails. I missed the entirety of the Republican convention, for which I shall be eternally grateful to the good ship Frodo. I missed my afternoon coffee, although we did on occasion adhere to the British Royal Navy tradition of a full-gill ration of rum for the crew (served with a wedge of lime to ward off scurvy). I missed running, but not too much. Standing on the heaving deck of a sailboat requires constant small adjustments to keep your feet braced. It’s like a day-long session doing the core muscle maneuvers you get taught in a Pilates class. I missed hot showers. The evening routine was a quick jump off the back of the Frodo into the fifty-degree water. Followed by an even quicker scramble up the ladder to stand on deck and try to suck the air back into your lungs.
I missed the soft touch of my wife, and a weekend visit by a newly mobile and endlessly curious toddler named Oscar. Other than these last two important items, there is little that I missed as much as I liked heading into the wind and the waves on a compass point less traveled.
If think you’d like to give it a try, you can find the Frodo’s home berth at sailsuperior.com.
