Great Lakes Symposium

If I had realized how far Grand Marais, MI was, I might not have signed up for the symposium. 500 miles, and at the tip of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. I left Wednesday afternoon in hopes of arriving in time for the surf class on Thursday and stopped for the night half way there.

I did arrive in time for the surf class (barely - forgot about the time change), but alas, there was neither wind nor surf. So I ended up pitching my tent before the campground filled up and before the rain started, both good things. My tent neighbor was a wonderful man from Winona, Minnesota, and we had several enjoyable conversations over the course of the weekend.

Friday morning was the intermediate/advanced tour day. I had signed up for my first Advanced tour, which was an 18 mile paddle from Miner's Castle along the Pictured Rocks. As a sign of how unreliable self rating of skill level is, the lead instructor for this tour started with some basic questions that he was clearly concerned about. Does everyone know how to do a wet exit? Who has paddled 18 miles (the length of trip) before? Who has padded in 2-3 foot seas before? We all replied that we had done those things, and he was hugely relieved, but I was still apprehensive about whether my skills were up to the trip.

I ended up giving a ride from the symposium to the launch beach to an experienced paddler from Portland, OR, who was visiting his brother from Iowa. They had just done a trip in the Apostle Islands, then come to the symposium. I learned a lot from Ken and had fun traveling with him. He commented on how much he had enjoyed the Apostles, yet how different they were from the ocean. Tides, marine life, birds, etc.

When we had all arrived at the departure point, we set off east from Miner's Beach with winds out of the northwest, 2 foot waves, and a lot of reflecting waves coming off the cliff face to our right. I saw my first vivid examples of clapotis when I saw thin vertical waves spike up fleetingly, twice the height of the surrounding waves.

I didn't feel confident enough to pull my camera out of my PFD pocket and take pictures, so I concentrated on staying upright and keeping up with the group. We were a bit over half way to the turn around point when we started seeing fog infiltrating over the tops of the cliffs. When we looked behind us, we saw that Grand Island had disappeared. About 2/3 along the planned route, we were fully fogged in and decided to turn around. We came back to Mosquito Beach, had lunch, then continued back to our launch site. The sun appeared briefly, then was lost again in the fog. At one point, we could see the tops of the cliff faces backlit by the sun, with the fog hiding the cliffs below, which was quite magical. We also saw an eagle soaring along the cliff face.

At trip's end, the instructors commented on how pleasantly surprised they were that all of the participants had lived up to the claims of experience they had made.

On Saturday, I had opted for a video session in the morning and a rescue scenarios class in the afternoon. As a last minute addition, they also offered wind and waves classes to take advantage of the steady winds blowing across a long fetch onto a sand beach, creating a safe place to work on surf skills. I was tempted to take those courses, but alas, one can't do everything.

Mike M was the instructor for both of my Saturday courses. I had met Mike at the Windy City Symposium in Chicago, though I hadn't taken any classes from him. Both of the Saturday classes were great. Sharpened a lot of skills in the morning (good prep for the ICE). In the afternoon, we had 4 students and 3 instructors for the rescue scenarios. I think the instructors dialed back the intensity of the course due to the skill level of the students, but it was still great fun and very good practice to be out in the 2-3 foot waves. The highlight was doing an All In rescue (where everyone is out of their boats) and succeeding in my first re-enter and roll attempt. My immediate thought after that (having seen that my paddling companions were in the process of rescuing themselves and closely watched by instructors) was to bail my boat, on the theory that a boat that was about to capsize again due the water sloshing around in it was not a good choice. Wrong answer! Right answer is to get over to your paddling buddies and jointly right the boats, raft up, and then bail. And one needs to add paddling a boat full of water to one's checklist of skills to practice.

As we returned to the beach after the rescue class, it turned out that the race was about to start. It was too windy to set race buoys out, so the course was 5 times around the moored sailboats in the harbor, which would be a 15 or 20 minute race. People were lining up for the start and suggested that I join in, so I figured what the heck. There were 8 racers and I started on the outside. I was last around the first turn. As the race went on I managed to move up to 4^th place. When my rescue class buddies arrived and saw us racing, they were cheering for me, which was a treat. The symposium had awards left over from previous year's races, so we each got a very impressive medal despite the low turnout and informal nature of the race.

Dinner that night was a fundraiser for the local school (with a total enrollment of 35 kids in grades K-12). Homemade pasties really hit the spot after a hard day's work. After dinner the township supervisor talked about the serious and urgent problem they are facing with the harbor becoming filled with sand. A breakwater was built over 100 years ago, but it's now deteriorating due to an inexcusable lack of maintenance. If nothing is done, the harbor will be completely filled in 5-10 years. The sand directly caused a completely preventable local tragedy a few years back when 4 men were out fishing in a small boat (they couldn't get their larger boat out of the harbor) and capsized. Nobody could launch a rescue boat from the harbor, so they had to wait for the Coast Guard to come. By that time, 3 of the men had died.

In addition to the local impact on the lives and families and livelihoods and economy, Grand Marais harbor is the only safe harbor on a long stretch of rugged coast. The next harbors are 45 miles in each direction, so if the Grand Marais harbor is lost, there will be a 90 mile stretch with no harbor. The standard is to have a safe harbor every 35 miles.

Plans are drawn up for repairing the breakwall and dredging, but the $6 million to pay for the work hasn't been found. You can learn more and find out how to help at http://www.saveyourharbor.com This is a quintessential no brainer; how can we not do this? But it takes action to do the right thing, so let's all do our part. Contacting congresspeople and senators is a great step.

Sunday morning was a bit anticlimactic. The highlight was watching Mike M. doing traditional rolls and having someone else describing what he was doing. For the first time I understood what a rich world traditional paddling offers. I'm going to go a little farther focusing on paddling with a Euro blade, but I can hear the traditional paddle calling. One of our club members has offered to help those of us with no woodworking skills get started on making a paddle, and I'm definitely going to take him up on that.

And then it was time to drive the 500 miles back home. Two thirds of the way home, walking back to my car at a gas station after getting a cup of coffee, I was pleasantly surprised to see the famous author of The Lake is the Boss blog filling up his car with gas. I introduced myself to Dave and his wife and we chatted for a while before getting back on the road.