This three part article is the first piece in the Great Lakes Series, which consists of reports from the sailboat The Odyssey on 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

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.

Lake flies—which perhaps should be called “war-flies” for their unrivaled depravity and wanton thirst for violence—aren’t shy about landing on a person or biting them. I was sitting around in the cockpit, watching the waves go by in what I’d like to believe was a fairly non-threatening manner, when one emerged from the lake and took a bite out of my knuckle. This was incredibly rude but I gave it the benefit of the doubt and assumed the fly was just having a bad day. Certainly they couldn’t all be this ill-tempered. It was when a second fly came around to pry meat from my forehead, which is more important to me than my knuckle, that I realized we were at war. This was no minor annoyance. These flies were an existential threat.

I learned this by going to Amazon.com and reading the sample pages of a book by Chomp T. Williamson, a self-described fly researcher from Minnesota who totally exists, called Lakes and Flies, Flies and Lakes, Coming to Get You, Cover Your Head. The book has since disappeared from Amazon, and for that matter everywhere else, but I was able to excerpt part of it for this article:

“Tell everyone to buy my book! … The fly, having spent the entirety of its life buzzing about the water, becomes rabid when it sees a boat. It’s first course of action will be to identify the cockpit so that it may attempt a hijacking. But the fly is too small to turn the wheel, and even were it large enough has too little experience sailing to commandeer the ship, and lacks the strength to pull a line. It’s (sic) dreams having been destroyed, the fly then embarks upon a suicide mission to exterminate any and all living inhabitants on the boat. The most important part of this strategy is to enter the cabin so that it may nest in or around one’s bed. Once this has occurred the only recourse left to the sailor is the terrible art of fly murder—or as I have called it: Fly butchery.”

Fly butchery, as Chomp T. Williamson will tell you at great length, is a messy business. When I embarked on this trip, as noted above, I was rather inexperienced in such work. But there are sixty million flies on Lake Michigan and it turns out they all want you dead.

There were three fly swatters on the boat, but both Sue and Kurt were too busy with the whole business of sailing to devote themselves full time to the art of fly butchery. I, for whom it would be an understatement to call an inexperienced sailor, was free for this sordid task. It was easy enough on the deck to kill a fly. The job is extraordinarily simple should the fly land upon one’s leg. For whatever reason it will assume that one’s leg is some sort of safe haven, which is not true. Other good places for a fly to land, should the reader be a fly, are the side seats of the cockpit or the fly swatter itself.

Fly butchery becomes more complicated when the fly decides to enter the cabin. For therein lies a fairly small space which may at any given time sway violently in just about any direction. But that’s not the only problem. There are also real, physical, obstacles that can intercept the swatter, or even worse, give the fly butcher enough pause to allow the fly to escape. Good examples are beds, sinks, cups full of liquid (it’s more difficult to clean a spill on a boat, it being moving and all, than on land and it’s a waste of materials which might come in handy later). On more than one night I simply gave up dealing with the flies in my quarters because once killed they would fall gracelessly onto my bed. Another time a fly actually got under me while I was sleeping—an act which only ensured his own death.

There were also flies for whom I showed mercy in the vein that Williamson recommends in his book. As Williamson put it, “Just because most flies do not express gratitude towards you does not mean that they are incapable of it. Some of my best friends are flies. I call them, ‘my flies.’”

For example, there was a fly couple who seemed to be doting upon each other. I thought it would be tragic and cruel to kill them whilst in the throes of love so I wished them luck and told them to get off the boat. Of course, one of us might have ended up killing them later. It’s kind of hard to tell which fly is which given that they sort of all look like flies. Another was a very tiny fly who, when I raised my swatter, looked towards me with a terrible grimace.

I felt bad for the thing and said, with my best but admittedly inaudible impression of fly speak, “You, go now. It is time for you to leave this boat. I will let you go, for you are small unlike your dearly departed cousins—Dwixel and Queeb—for whom there was…”

Then it landed on my hand and bit my knuckle.

Other flies, which had found their way into the cabin, would hang pathetically around the porthole screens attempting to escape. Outside their fellows crawled across the screen encouraging them, looking for some way to get their friends out, or perhaps taunting them. I don’t know. They had entered the boat without any clue as to how to leave. For these I also showed mercy for they were at least making an effort (unlike the mayflies, who make no efforts in life whatsoever and can simply be picked up and thrown off the boat without a fuss). When he wasn’t busy maneuvering the ship Kurt would occasionally flip the screen so that they might leave. Sue tried this once and part of the screen snapped off. Unfortunately for the flies, once this happened, our outlet for mercy was closed. Of course, were the flies just a bit more intelligent they could have left the same way they came in. This would have been much appreciated. But such thoughts are not common among flies.

We were surrounded by flies for most of the first day on the lake. Their activity was dependent upon the wind and they’d scatter whenever it picked up. But though the wind phased them they were morbidly undisturbed by the deaths of their fellows. A fly would observe one of its comrades being crushed to a pulp and, instead of retreating, would double down on its assault. This was disconcerting as flies are famously social creatures.

I’ll note that the character and personality of the flies changed depending on which lake they hailed from. The flies of Lake Michigan were vicious but also stupid. This is not true for all flies. Their Canadian cousins in Lake Huron, North Channel, and Lake Erie were a bit more clever but just as aggressive. The flies on Lake St. Clair were skittish—three of them, who crouched meekly in a row on one of the lifelines, fled when I tossed a cherry seed off the boat in their general direction. The seed came nowhere near close to hitting any of them, nor was that my intention, but they never came back.

It was at sunset that the flies finally decided to abandon their horrible mission. Most of the survivors fluttered off into the distance, squawking just like gulls do (okay, that’s not true), never to be seen again. And though a few refused to leave, as the air became cool and the wind picked up, the fleet itself did not return. Among the things that flies don’t like, it turns out, are cool air and storms. The storm part will become important in a couple paragraphs.

The lake was calm, the night had settled, and Kurt went down to the cabin to sleep around midnight. Sue and I took up the night watch position. In the distance lay some clouds which were surely moving away from us to the East. After all, the Coast Guard hadn’t warned us about anything at all.

Part II: The Black, The Blue, and The Emerald Storms

Spoiler alert: We ran into a bunch of horrible, horrible, storms. There were four in total but we were anchored for the last one in a small harbor town called Ludington—which I’ll note is kind of a goofy sounding name for a town—and completely avoided the worst of it so I’m not going to count that one. Suffice to say that a storm on the lake is somewhat different that one on land. I will attempt here to describe this in some level of detail.

– The Black Storm –

The first storm came at night.

We were somewhere around the middle of Lake Michigan, so far that land could not be seen in any direction and no cellular signal could find us (or is it the other way around?), heading in the direction of a Michigan town called Muskegon. Oh, it was a beautiful night, calm and serene, with little glints of light sparkling off of the jet black waves. Looking astern (which means behind the stern, or backwards, or behind the boat) we could make out a tiny dot of light, which, moving about 14 knots to our five, caught up to us rather quickly. It was a freighter and it could be seen about seven miles off the port side of the Odyssey. It was pretty cool and I tried to get a picture of it so you all could see it.

But that didn’t work out so well. You’ll just have to trust me. I mean, what the hell else would this be a picture of? A dog? I have a picture of one of those too but it’s not for this article.

But before I get further into the storms I have to come clean about something: Chomp T. Williamson, the self described fly researcher from Minnesota, does not exist and neither does his book. The more clever amongst you will perhaps get a feeling of triumph from this incredible revelation. The rest of you—well, I apologize I guess. But not really.

Sue and I were standing in the cockpit watching this rather menacing looking storm in the distance which appeared to be getting smaller at first. One could see flashes of lightning up there and suffice to say it looked unpleasant in the kind of way that lightning storms tend to. We watched it for about fifteen minutes before we noticed that the storm was not becoming smaller but was, in fact, becoming larger. In case the reader is not particularly good with distances or perspective, this meant that it was getting closer to us. Had we been close enough to the coast to receive data on our phones this would not have been a problem. We would have been able to check the Accuweather radar online.

Once it became evident that we were entering and not moving away from a storm, Sue went into the cabin to grab her raincoat because thunderstorms are often accompanied by rain (just in case you weren’t aware; I try to be helpful). I was left on deck for a minute or two muttering something like,“Oh, wow. Jeez. Yikes. That sure is a storm over there,” in the typical Midwestern fashion. When she came back up I went into the cabin to do the same. My raincoat was in my quarters, in a little closet which houses all of my clothes, on a hanger. My quarters are located in the stern halfway underneath the cockpit. This is actually a nice place to be because it’s one of the more stable parts of the ship in bad weather—the stern moves much less while crashing over a wave than the bow, which is where the master bedroom is located. It is however a fairly small room—a bit larger than your average closet but not by too much and with so little headspace over the bed that one is quite often fated to smack the roof of one’s skull into the ceiling. Regardless it’s actually fairly large for a guest cabin on a boat and because it was designed to house a couple has room on the bed to use as extra storage space.

(A note, this from THE FUTURE: These quarters feel downright large now.)

Anyway, I was putting on this raincoat, which took me a minute or two longer than it should have because I’m not good with zippers, when I heard a loud crash and noticed that some kind of heavy can, the fly swatter, a couple books, and a bucket had slid rather violently to the starboard side of the vessel. For a moment there I stood still and thought about a bunch of movies about boats that I had seen at some point in the past and remembered that whenever stuff starts sliding around it usually means that something bad is about to happen. I also know enough about physics and gravity to realize that it meant that the boat was keeling over onto its side.

Kurt had been asleep but he was up pretty much immediately and bolted straight to the cockpit (I later found out from the official blog that he was literally thrown out of his bed, which was why he got up so quickly). The wind, and its accompanying waves, was crashing mercilessly into the port side of the vessel—dragging the main sail and the boat with it closer and closer to the surface of the lake. While I was still in the cabin, Kurt turned the boat into the direction of the wind. When I climbed back up we were crashing through the waves and though the wind speed was climbing by the second the sky remained clear of rain. As we moved through the storm the wind speed climbed up to about 45 knots. Had that hit the Odyssey from the port or starboard sides of the ship we would have probably been in a very nasty situation. We might similarly have been in a nasty situation had Kurt not lowered the jib sail (a secondary sail which is used to further manipulate the wind) shortly before he went to sleep. This was the most worrying part of this storm. The rest of it was fun and sort of exciting, at least, for a time.

One of the curious things about Lake Michigan and most other bodies of water in general is a certain lack of street lights or similar devices to provide illumination. It was pitch black outside the boat except when lightning struck and when that did happen the lightning was bright enough to leave one momentarily blinded. But it was better than nothing. And, as it were, lightning struck often. I would estimate that once every four seconds or so a lightning bolt would course down through the sky, or sideways through the clouds, or in every direction at once in some kind of weird lightning explosion. The radar didn’t help either. The storm was too large for the signal to penetrate and in any event all it picked up was rain, rain, and more rain.

The storm lasted all night and into the morning. It wasn’t until about 4:00 am that we cleared the thing and even then the seas were in a confused state with waves coming from each and every direction rocking the ship back and forth and up and down and all over the place. The storm had left a horrible mess in its wake, and one could see it behind the ship with lightning going off like “popcorn popping,” which was how Kurt would later describe it.

I don’t know for sure why the Coast Guard failed to warn everyone about this giant storm that was moving into Lake Michigan but I have it on good authority that this was all caused by Goober, a miserable scum demon who used to live in my couch and who would harass anyone unfortunate enough to fall asleep on it. Goober, after being exorcised from the couch in a process that either mostly or entirely involved me drinking a lot of beer, I can’t remember, would apparently go on to work as some kind of contractor for the Coast Guard. It doesn’t take much work to connect the dots from there.

Other working theories include great quantities of Jack Daniels and several prostitutes. But I have no evidence for this and would hate to suggest that the Coast Guard, one of the less obviously disgraced institutions in the United States, might at all be irresponsible.

With the worst of it over, I decided to get some sleep and went down into my quarters to do just that.

– The Blue Storm –

By the time I woke up around noon we were entering another storm. While I was asleep we had started heading North from the Muskegon area. It turned out there were two storms to the north with a narrow gap between them which could be navigated. This was what Kurt tried to do. Unfortunately it was not to be. Mother nature, with her typical sense of cruel humor, thought it would just be a hoot to squeeze two storms into a single much more awful storm. This second storm was worse than the first. Though the first had briefly reached wind speeds of 45 knots the second ran up to 50, which is a larger difference than it sounds. When I woke I could hear the mast and all the movable parts of the ship creaking and cracking and making all sorts of horrible noises. The only upside was that it was during the day and so there was no problem with visibility.

We were traversing this storm when the Coast Guard woke from their collective bender or whatever they were doing and decided it might be prudent to issue some kind of warning. It was a pretty simple message: All vessels needed to clear Lake Michigan. Another storm was coming and was going to be worse than the last two.

(This is about as good a point as any to note that I found out on this trip that the Coast Guard doesn’t do much beyond coordination in the Great Lakes. So if you’re on a boat and you hit a rock or something don’t expect an orange helicopter to come save your ass. It might—but I wouldn’t count on it. The only time we saw any indication that the Coast Guard might actually rescue someone was in Canadian waters and, listening to the radio, it sounded like that boat was taking on water fast).

It was around that point that Kurt turned the ship south to anchor near a marina. The coastal town of Manistee was not too far to the north but, being on a river, would have nowhere calm to anchor. The anchorage was to the south near a port town called Ludington.

– The Emerald Storm –

We traveled south along the coast for about an hour while a dozen or so motorboats raced past us towards the Ludington marina. These were mostly locals who already had slips in the marina but a few boaters could be heard calling the harbor over the radio to secure one for their own boat; we on the other hand would be anchoring in the harbor. Trailing just behind the Odyssey was a smaller sailboat which which was taking a thrashing from the waves. And then, to the west, was the third storm—a bizarre looking green wall of rain which was approaching at high speed.

This one was supposed to be the worst. Kurt’s sailing mentor called with a rather jovial warning about how awful this storm was going to be. My dad, who was observing our progress online, sent me an incredibly useful text message letting me know that the giant storm which I could see pretty clearly from the boat was actually there and not some kind of collective delusion that had descended upon the fine denizens of Lake Michigan. But it was in many ways an easier storm to deal with than those preceding it. The waves were intense before the storm hit but once it did they calmed and the wind settled; it was bumpy but paled in comparison to the others. What this storm had that the others did not was a torrential rain which made it impossible to see much of anything except for an emerald green.

The Odyssey motored into Ludington’s harbor. There were now flood warnings being issued for all the coastal towns of Lake Michigan. Ludington, for sure, had received its fair share of rain. The water was high; most of the docks were almost completely submerged and it was clear that the trail leading up to the lighthouse was barely an inch above the water. The seawalls likewise could hardly be made out from the lake itself. Little rocky lines stuck out from the water and that was about all one could see of them. The larger waves would crash over them but despite this they did their job in breaking them.

We pulled through the harbor and past the marina, which was full of boats that had likewise escaped the storm, and anchored near another sailboat. The remnants of some trees or maybe a bush floated by. Once we had anchored, Kurt and Sue took some time as the storm passed to take a nap. At some point another storm came by and it rained for a bit but the effects were hardly felt in the harbor. Suffice to say I spent most of this time sitting on the side of the cockpit, vaping, which is not a particularly interesting thing for you to read about.

Part III: A Close Encounter at Sea Involving Coffee

– Close Encounter 1: UFO (Unidentified Floating Object) –

We left the Ludington harbor after an hour or so of being at anchor and set out upon our original path. The wind had picked up in the wake of the storms which allowed us to make good time retracing our steps. Though we had been set back the new plan was identical to the old one. We were to head north along the coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula and shoot by the North and South Manitou islands towards Round Lake, which marks the entrance to Charlevoix, MI and where one must wait for a drawbridge to open before entering. After passing the drawbridge we would sail or motor through Round Lake to the much larger Lake Charlevoix and through there to the harbor town of Boyne City. Our estimated time of arrival in Boyne City was to be at about 1:00pm the following day. The only real obstacles would be that the islands we had to travel between were on a major shipping line and, just as trains always have the right of way on land, so too do freighters by default have the right of way at sea.

When it came time for night watch Sue and I were again in the cockpit. This night, unlike the previous one, was calm and quite lacking in large waves. It was a bit foggy though, which obscured our line of sight, and the dodger—a windshield, essentially—became impenetrably clouded. This was an easy fix. We raised the pane at the center of the dodger so we could see through. The side windows couldn’t be raised but it was easy enough to look around them.

We were motoring north a few miles west of the Michigan coastline. It was a peaceful and uncomplicated night to start. That didn’t change until we spied a little red light off the starboard side of the ship, around the 2:00 position forward, which appeared to moving in our direction. The light didn’t appear on our navigation chart as a ship or as a buoy, which uses a program called AIS (short for Automated Identification System) to track various vessels. AIS provides boaters with a dearth of information including the bearing of a ship, the kind of freight it is carrying should it be a freighter (sometimes: this is dependent on whether the vessel has this listed), its size, its speed, etc. Commercial vessels and large ships are required to use AIS. Many recreational boaters do as well but it’s not mandatory in the United States. The thing about AIS is that should one not be running it the boater can only be identify vessels by line of sight or by radar and neither Sue or were exactly sure how to toggle the radar at the time. The only drawback to AIS is the incredibly loud and annoying alarm sound that goes off whenever there’s another ship with AIS that’s drawing close or it loses the home ship’s GPS location. The former is useful, of course. But it can be irritating or disturbing when it either goes off for no reason or one can see clearly the ship it’s warning about from the cockpit.

Sue set the course 10 degrees further west but the ship, or the light, or whatever it was because we weren’t quite sure at the time, seemed to match. She changed course again, further west. And then again. But regardless of how far to the west the Odyssey adjusted its course the light remained in much the same position. Some minutes passed and the light split into two. There was the original red light, which was close to the water, and a white light hovering high above it. But it was still hard for us to tell how far away it was, in what direction it was moving, or even what it was. I secretly hoped it was a UFO. That would be great, I thought. A whole UFO! The kind that come from space. What a great story that would be.

But before long I could hear the sound of a helicopter and I knew for sure what was going on. There was a boat out there, not too far away, doing something. That was the red light. And then there was the white light, which had be the helicopter. There was definitely a helicopter in this equation, of that I was sure. I wondered what they could be doing out here on the lake. Maybe it was some kind of rescue. Or a drug deal. It was also possible a group of Welsh mercenaries had been hired to leave an ambush for us so to rob me of my precious and completely useful Wahl Manscaper.

By the time I had thought about all of these very likely possibilities we were bearing down on the lights like nothing else. It was still difficult to see just how close we were but it was obvious we had minutes or less to adjust our course. But the thing appeared to be following us. I went to down to wake up Kurt, and was first unsuccessful in this task, and we went back up to deck. Sue looked rattled.

“Yeah, that thing. It’s a boat and a helicopter,” I said, proud that I had identified the helicopter. It takes a clear eye to identify a helicopter from such a distance. “Not sure what the helicopter is doing out there.”

“It was a sailboat,” Sue said.

“You sure about that Aunt Sue?” I asked, skeptical. “Pretty sure I heard a helicopter.”

“No, I was close enough to see the deck, and the sails, and the mast, and the guy standing on the deck.”

So there was no helicopter. That was a disappointment. But what wasn’t disappointing was that we didn’t crash into the boat. Sue made a giant circle turn around the ship, presumably leaving the sailor there kind of confused, and then barreled south. Kurt put the ship back on its course and then went back to sleep. I was personally confused and kind of embarrassed that there hadn’t even been a helicopter.

Later in the night Kurt explained a bit about the lights and where we had gone wrong. There are several navigational lights that are required by law to be lit during the night but for the purposes of this paragraph we are only going to cover two of them, which are red and green. The primary function of these lights is to tell boaters in which direction a ship is moving and whether or not they have the right of way. The red light is on the port side of the ship and tells approaching boaters that they must yield. The green light, on the starboard side, tells approaching boaters that they have the right of way. This was why, in the above event, we could never seem to get away from the red light—it was moving in the same direction and as far as that sailor was concerned he had the right of way. To avoid him we would have had to veer east, not west.

– Close Encounter 2: Coffee –

I decided it would be a good idea to make some coffee since I had just been stricken by the infamous “helicopter delusion” experienced by all travelers at some point in their lives (this is so well known that I’m genuinely surprised you’ve never heard of it). It was very early in the morning, after all, and I was starting to fade. So I went into the cabin and started working the stove, whose name is Princess. Sue came down and asked if I needed help. I said no, because, I mean, it’s a stove. I know how to use that.

Anyway, I was wrong and she had to help me get it started, which is kind of a process. First one must turn on the gas. You don’t want that running all the time because, as one might imagine, fire and boats do not make good bedfellows. Once that’s done you have to press the burner ignition button, keep it pressed while you turn the knob to ignite, and then continue to press the ignition button for a few seconds. If you fail to do that the fire will go out. All that’s simple enough.

What’s not simple is preventing your cup from falling over. The Mr. Coffee machine that’s on the boat needs AC electricity, which is only available at port or when a gasoline generator is running. Because of this, if you want a coffee made in transit, you’ll have to do a pour over. The stove itself is gimballed and will stay level so one doesn’t have to worry about the water pot falling off unless the ship is moving up and down instead of just left and right (which it was at the time). The counter top, on the other hand, where you will pour the water, is not. Coffee brewing is thus a careful and dangerous balancing act. Pour with one hand, hold the cup with the other, and lock your legs as much as possible to keep balanced until you can put the water pot down and hold onto something stable.

The Odyssey was motoring north while I was brewing the coffee and though it was mostly calm the boat was rocky enough, moving up and down through small waves, that letting go of the cup and the pour over brewing device (I forgot what this is called and can’t be bothered to look it up right now; so what if I’ve worked in a coffee shop before) would probably mean a nasty mess on the floor. The water pot is held in place by a couple of fiddlesticks—metal clamps which look a bit like tuning forks that can be attached to the stove to ensure that pots don’t move around too much in harsh waters. They didn’t look particularly tight so I went to manipulate the one on the right to get it in a better place. But it fell off. I already had the brewing device over my cup with a couple spoonfuls of coffee in it and was holding that with my right hand. Meanwhile the fiddlestick, which is made of metal of course, was still hot from having had a fire under it for several minutes.

I tried to get the thing back on the stove with my left hand. There were two problems with this: the first was that it was hot and I don’t like burns; the second that once it was on the stove it had to be secured by twisting a little plastic knob at the end which would tighten its grip on this long bar on the stove to which it attached. As one can imagine this is quite difficult to do with one hand. This dilemma was partly abated when the water finished boiling but I hadn’t really thought out what I was doing and was now in a position where I might have to pour the water into the pour over device with my left hand—which would almost certainly end in tragedy because of the grave incompetence of my left hand. My right hand was busy holding the cup and I couldn’t put the water pot back down on the stove because the fiddlestick remained unattached.

After muttering some gibberish and sweating a bit I managed the old switcheroo and crossed my arms to pour the water in an incredibly awkward and dangerous manner. That was fine. Then I let go of the coffee, trusting in the powers that be that it wouldn’t fall over, and reattached the fiddlestick to the stove. This didn’t hurt as much as I expected. The fiddlestick was still hot but it had cooled off a bit while I was trying to figure out how to move forward. It was, anyways, a wonderful learning experience and I never had trouble making coffee again.