Flat Calm

Our son's school has a three-week summer writing camp starting this week. They kicked it off with a visit to the Michigan Maritime Museum, in South Haven, Michigan,USA.

After a couple of hours in the morning learning about Great Lakes history, the kids (and some of the adults) took a sail on Lake Michigan in the Friends Good Will, a sloop the museum built in 2004.

Here they are pushing away from the dock and getting ready to sail down the channel.

Friends Good Will has a diesel engine to get her back and forth when there's no wind. Good thing, too: yesterday the top wind speed was WNW at 7 miles per hour. Most of the day it was flat calm.

I stayed ashore with my camera and drove down to the pier so I could take pictures. I got ahead of them and got one picture as they came down the channel to the lake.

In the background are some of the boat slips in South Haven. We're looking northeast from the sidewalk on the south side of the channel.

She was going pretty fast and got ahead of me as I race-walked down the sidewalk by the channel and onto the pier.

I got a nice shot just after they left the channel, complete with a small sailboat and a gull up by Friends Good Will's mast.

I sat on the end of the south pier in the shade of "Big Red," the lighthouse at the end of the pier by the south beach, watched fish jump, listened to gulls and tourists, and tried to get pictures as they put up the sails.

They stayed out for about an hour. The sky finally started to clear and it got a little hot after an overcast morning with a sprinkling of rain.

They were out in the distance and it was hazy. This picture was the best one with the sails up. But you can see how little wind there was: the lake is smooth and calm, and the two flags are hanging limp.

The only waves they had were when a powerboat would swing around and come racing up to the channel. Probably a good thing for uncertain stomachs -- nobody was seasick!

One last shot of Friends Good Will heading back to the dock.

Both the Maritime Museum website and the Friends Good Will volunteer website have tons of information on her history, size and technical specifications, the history of the historic sloop she is named after, and lots more photos than I have the patience to upload, even resized, on a dial-up connection.

Information on the city of South Haven, Michigan, including exciting things like zoning ordinances, can be found here.