Albrecht Dürer’s 1495 engraving of a mayfly (so I forgot to take a picture of a mayfly). Sourced from Wikipedia.
This “two part” article is the second piece in the Great Lakes Series. Click here to read the introductory piece and click here for a link to my Uncle Kurt’s official blog to follow the trip in real time.
Part I: Mayflies
The mayfly is a curious little bug. I was introduced to them years ago, when I was twelve or something, at a summer camp in northern Wisconsin. They’re completely harmless and, generally, just about as stupid. At the summer camp they came in droves. Thousands appeared overnight and blanketed the ground, the walls, the doors, and everything in sight. Their survival instincts, to say the least, are lacking. Most bugs, regular flies for example, notice when someone is coming their way and will move to prevent their own death. Your average mayfly is not so clever—it has found its spot, as it were, and having found it will remain there even under penalty of death.
This three part article is the first piece in the Great Lakes Series, which consists of reports from the sailboat The Odysseyon a leg of its voyage—namely from Lake Michigan to Montreal. Click here to read the introductory piece and click here for a link to my Uncle Kurt’s official blog to follow the trip in real time.
Part I: I AM BECOME DEATH; DESTROYER OF FLIES
This machine kills flies. Photo by me.
So it turns out there’s a lot of flies out there on Lake Michigan.
On land I’ve tried my best to be something of a gentle soul towards all of the Earth’s creatures (excepting those I dislike) and will do my best to avoid killing ants, centipedes, spiders, and other various insects that might eat some of Earth’s more irritating creatures, i.e. mosquitoes. A moth once awarded me a blue ribbon, similar to that awarded to Pabst, emblazoned with the words “Friend to all the Insects.” This wasn’t true but I appreciated the sentiment. Even flies, one of the more irritating species of insect, I tended to spare
On the lake such a thing became a tragic impossibility. The flies had to die and die they did. I don’t know how many flies have now died by my hand. 50? 100? 1000? Probably not 1000, that would be a lot of flies, but certainly more flies than I ever wanted to kill.
My first experience with a lake fly was on the night before we set out whilst I lay in bed in my quarters on the Odyssey. The little creature had gotten itself into my room and was strutting about as I slept, rudely landing on my head on several occasions, and generally making a pest of itself. I rectified this not by killing the thing, for it seemed a petty thing to do at the time rather than the necessity that it would soon be, but by covering my head with a blanket. This solved the problem for the night. But there would be more flies to come.
Anchored just off of Club Island (I think. Have a few pics like this from different islands) in the Georgian Bay. Photo by me.
In mid June or so my Aunt Sue stopped by the house with an interesting offer. She and my Uncle Kurt had been planning a fairly unconventional trip for a while—a sailing trip which would take them through the Great Lakes, up through Canada, down into the Atlantic and south along the East Coast, and then further into the Caribbean.
While I couldn’t do the whole trip—it will take about a year and I don’t have the kind of funds to be gone for that long—I let them know that I could go for a month or two. Because it turns out it’s kind of hard to plan anything resolutely with sailing as so much is dependent upon the weather we eventually put a physical location, the city of Montreal, which I’ve been told by various reputable sources is in Canada, as my point of departure.
It’s been a little more than two weeks since we set out from Winthrop Harbor, a small marina a stone’s throw from the Illinois/Wisconsin border. The ship, named the Odyssey, is a 40′ sailboat called an Island Packet 380 built for ocean travel. Since we left we’ve gone through storms on Lake Michigan, rested in Boyne City, MI, sailed through the Northern Channel in Canada, and south across Lake Huron. We’ve stayed at the rustic town of Bruce Mines in Ontario and peaceful, idyllic, port towns such as Little Current on the Manitoulin Island. We’ve anchored next to an island full of rattlesnakes (no, we didn’t go on the island because it turns out that rattlesnakes are not to be trifled with).
Our itinerary is rather chaotic. Everything depends upon the weather, whether or not there is nearby a calm anchorage, and upon the sometimes exorbitant fees charged per foot by marinas to dock. At the time of this writing we’re resting in Cleveland, OH. Thursday we leave to head north, back to Canada, and through the Welland Canal and the industrial locks there allowing one to circumvent Niagara Falls.
The articles following this prelude will cover some of the aforementioned locations and others. It will also give some handy tips on murdering flies (before you say I’m callous: these flies are vicious, unrelenting, and they bite—they’re a bunch of shitheads), stories regarding a series of storms which caught us in Lake Michigan, where to get a drink and sing karaoke if you find yourself in Bruce Mines, and a heartwarming piece about mayflies and gnats. Other topics may or may not be written depending upon the mood and laziness of the author.
If you want to track the trip in real time and well after I’m back in Chicago, you can check out my Uncle Kurt’s blog at this link. From there you can view the entirety of the trip, track the boat, and correct me when I inevitably put the wrong name to some island out here in one of my articles.
