Scott Akerman, our Cruising Odyssey partner and ad director, just started an epic, 2,400-nm delivery of a 2018 Coastal Craft Concord 65 from Midland, Canada, to Portland, Maine. A professional captain, Akerman has sailed more than 100,000 miles offshore, and cruised in 18 countries around the world, but he has never traveled through these waters before. The aluminum-hulled Coastal Craft is named Indigo, and it’s powered by twin 900-hp Volvo Penta IPS pod drives. Captain Eli Bliss was the other person on board. Here’s Akerman’s first report:
Day 1: We were off the dock at Midland, at the bottom of Georgian Bay on Lake Huron, at 6 a.m. with rain, no wind and flat seas. I’ve been told that Georgian Bay is spectacularly beautiful, but sadly we had fog for most of the day’s trip down to Sarnia Marina, at the top of the St. Clair River.
If you’ve run in fog, you can appreciate what our day was like – 25 knots and staring out the window for a glimpse of the water or what might be coming at you, and then back to the dual screens set to different distances with radar overlay.
Is that a bird? An aid to navigation? A narwhal? We came across two vessels and never saw them, just their wakes.
An hour our from Sarnia, the fog lifted and the sun came out; the side effect being that the blood pressure dropped with more visibility.
The approach to the St. Clair River was finally the weather we wanted – clear with light breeze and no wind. Lake Huron is surprising clear, almost Caribbean blue in the shallows. There’s a lot of current headed toward the east so we were doing downstream, finally docking at the Sarnia Bay Marina.
