The Canadian adventure begins - July 2014

It is Friday, July 11, 2014 and we are headed to the higher latitudes in our motor yacht Changing Latitudes. It is a picture perfect day to start our three week trip to the North Channel of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. This will be a good shake down cruise for our 6,500 mile America's Great Loop adventure. For those of you that want to track our progress you can download a free app call Marine Traffic. This app tracks our AIS signal from our boat when our GPS is turned on during the day. You can look for a little triangle on the chart where you know we are near and tap it. You will see our boat name and other boat information will appear. You can save us as a favorite and easily find us the next day.Onboard for this trip is Dale and Andy Arnold and John and Priscilla Simons. We have made this trip to the North Channel three times previously on my 39' sailboat Blue Heaven. This will be a more comfortable ride and somewhat easier to navigate because the motor yacht only draws 3.5' of water compared to the sailboat which draws 7'.The day started out flat calm with winds South at 0 - 1 kts. We are cruising at 9 kts which is fuel efficient. We think we will get 2 miles per gallon at 9 kts Vs .6 miles per gallon at 25 kts. Our destination today is Port Washington, Wisconsin. That is a 60 mile trip from our home port of Waukegan, Illinois. There is Jeaneau sailboat owners rally in Port Washington starting today so several of our sailing friends will be there. I will call the marina soon to find out if we can get a slip. These rally's take up a lot of space. If there is no room at the Port Washington marina we will continue on another 30 miles to Sheboygan, Wisconsin.Our plan is continue north on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan for two days before we cross over east to the Michigan side. The Lake Huron to Mac race is this weekend so it will be a mob scene around St. Ignace and Mackinaw City. We want to time our arrival to miss most of the fleet departing. We want to buy fuel in St Ignace before we cross over into Canada where the fuel will be more expensive. The boat well suited for this trip. We have 500 gallons of diesel and 150 gallons of water. All systems are in good running order and the rum keg is topped off. We have one minor first world challenge. Our galley/kitchen is all electric. The refrigeration runs off 12 volt batteries but the stove, microwave and outlets are 110 volts. This is no problem when we are docked because we just plug into city power. On our cruise when we want to boil water we have to run a separate diesel generator. This is no big deal but having cruised on a sailboat for 12 years we have become minimalists. Since we already have 980 horse power diesel engines running it is against our nature to have to run a third engine just to boil a cup of water. Of course we could add an inverter to convert 12 volt power to 110 power without running the generator. Adding an inverter is a major project and somewhat expensive. These three weeks will give us time to learn and manage our energy needs onboard. As I said, it a minor first world challenge.This photo shows the wake of Changing Latitudes as we departed Waukegan harbor at 7:00 am. It will be 23 days until we cross our wake again.