Leaving Arcadia

We have been living on Speakeasy for a week; however, this is my first blog.

Leaving Arcadia – well-named lake -- like glass. Quietly motoring out the channel, I have a glimpse of what it might be like crossing into heaven.

Influenced no doubt by the knowledge that my mother was born in Arcadia 98 years ago in 1912. I remember how frustrated she became in the new millennium calculating her age. “Beth, I just don’t understand how to figure out how old I am. I was born February 14, 1912.” By then she was 88 but she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t subtract her birth date without what’s that called, taking away?

Seque to the sand. I cannot get enough of these dunes, especially here where they drop almost vertically into the limpid lake. This morning some are still shrouded in clouds. A big puffy mass of air with a misty underbelly. The sun will soon warm the clouds into submission.

To portside, which since we’re heading north is actually lakeside, two fishing boats perch on the horizon like complacent seagulls.

Now a monarch butterfly flits across Speakeasy from starboard to port and wishes us fair sailing.

Directly ahead, a fine black strip crosses the water like a low-slung breakwater. At 10 o’clock (the way boaters point out objects – using the bow of the boat as 12 o’clock on a wristwatch), the breakwater appears to open – or so it might seem if we were delirious and seeing a mirage. But we’re not. We have lots of water (only beverage while sailing), sunhats, sunsreen and even a sun umbrella that casts a welcome shadow over the helmsman, currently Mark.

Back to those creamy Palomino colored dunes. Small bushes and dune grass barely keep the golden sand from cascading into the water. Three hundred miles of sandy dunes skirting up the western shore of Michigan. Should be on the Register of Historic Places as the dunes are eroding away.

Today we’re motoring 5.7 knots per hour in 60 feet of water. We’re making our own wind which registers at 2.2 knots.

The clouds above cannot make up their collective mind. Cumulous crowd out mackerel-shaped ones whose striated wispy strips hang over the lake. Magical.