~Lake Michigan is 307 miles long, up to 118 miles wide, and up to 923 feet deep!

There is only one thing more fun than boating the 6000 miles of America’s Great Loop – having friends and family visit along the way! We are now on day 166 and Ed and I have been fortunate to have the our dear friends the Kuhnes, the Joneses, and the Flaughs visit Finito at different point along the hundreds of miles of Lake Michigan. So much fun!

Lake Michigan is an incredible body of fresh water, like an ocean. There were days when we had to stay in harbor because the waves were as high as ten feet! Many ships have gone down in Lake Michigan. You might recall Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” 

This huge great lake has had its ups and downs with water quality and right now she is probably as close to beautiful as she has ever appeared in modern times, but her beauty is only skin deep. Before I share photos of our friends and family, let me explain…

After Finito perilously made it through the Big Chute in Ontario, she soon entered the waters of Georgian Bay/Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. These two lakes are actually considered to be one connected by the Straights of Mackinac. In the 1600s the Native people led the first Frenchmen fur traders through these gigantic fresh waters and the portage of Chicago to the Mississippi River. At that time people were overwhelmed and overjoyed by the plethora of herring, trout, sturgeon, perch and whitefish swimming along a rocky sand bottom of Lake Michigan. These fish had been isolated from the oceans for thousands of years  as the great lakes were formed by the expansion and contraction of glaciers.

Today these beautiful glacial waters are different – mostly because of two invasive species of mussels: zebra and quagga. Both originated in the Caspian Sea but quagga can adhere much deeper and now make up most of the mass of mussels in the lake.

According to author Dan Egan’s, The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, since these invasive species entered – by way of ship ballast because  Lake Michigan was opened up to the ocean by locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959- the lake and all great lakes are greatly changed.

Today it is invasive mussels, not fish, that stretch from shore to shore, trillions of mussels, and they can filter all of Lake Michigan in about two weeks sucking out all the life that is the base of the food web. This has led to Lake Michigan’s waters becoming some of the clearest in the world. Clear but lacking in the building blocks of life.

Even though these water are stunning, “this gin clear water is not a sign of a healthy lake, it the sign of a lake in which the bottom of the food web is collapsing.” The dive in plankton (eaten by the mussels and about 90% down) is linked to a dive in fish populations but an over abundance in submerged aquatic vegetation (sunlight now reaches much further down).

Nonetheless, since the 1970s the lake has been stocked with salmon and trout and due to an invasive fish, the alewife’s numbers recently going down, many of the native fish species numbers are now going up. So the fishing news is not all bad. There are fish, just not as many of them.

When we were with the Joneses, Ed and I saw hundreds of fishermen bringing in hundreds of salmon and it was quite a sight. The salmon migrate up rivers running into Lake Michigan to spawn. In the 1970s the salmon were put in the lake to eat the invasive alewifes and they did…this created a sportsman’s haven.

FRIENDS

Friends, Scott and Linda Kuhns were the first to visit us. Ed has known them since his days at University of Florida. We were in the northern part of Lake Michigan when they visited near Harbor Springs. We saw Walloon Lake, a beautiful inland lake, where Ernest Hemingway’s family had a cottage when he was a boy. Hemingway credited this lake for giving him a love of the outdoors. Really interesting!

Joanne Zarro and Drew Jones were our second guests and what a great time it was! We had one rough ride in Lake Michigan form Charlevoix to Leland where all the food fell out of the refrigerator and I screamed as a rouge wave hit us stern side – but other than that, it was smooth sailing. We looked for Northern Lights at midnight and saw the beautiful Michigan sand dunes towering above the shoreline and talked late into the night.

When we were in Chicago, My sister Jenny and her husband Mike visited Finito. Ed loved seeing his brother and sister  in laws! The Flaughs are an absolute blast and we really made the best of the city. We took a boat architectural tour, visited Second City, the John Hancock building, and Manny’s Deli. Jenny even saved a goose with a broken wing by sharing its location – it was along the walkway of the lake- and by finding the right animal rescue. They texted Jenny back saying “We got your goose!” 🙂 We were so happy!

It was wonderful to have friends and family visit. Okee loved the company too. And with every visit we heard: “The water is so clear! So beautiful!”

Rather than explain everything I just wrote in this blog post, I would simply state “its the mussels….”

I have learned that while entertaining on distant waters it’s better not to explain too much of what’s going on below the surface. This just might ruin a great vacation. Our heads are already full of the issues of the St. Lucie River – Indian River Lagoon!