2015 SYNOPSIS

SummerTime went back into the water late for the 2015 season. It was May 29th. The touch up paint and varnish on the exterior woodwork looked nice in sunlight. Boat was only run across the Portage River to the summer slip from the winter storage building. In June we completed the installation of the "Trick Davits" on the swim platform. We also put the dinghy in and ran the Merc for the first time since summer 2014. The video advertising for "Trick Davits" made it easy to slide a dinghy up on the trick davit, but we had to take the engine off to load the dinghy. And both of us struggled to get the dinghy on. We took a day trip to MBI State Marina Park and stayed one night. It was raining on our return trip. We swung by PIB as the brig "Niagara" was there on its summer journey. We also added a filter into our cold water at the galley sink. It is a US Filter that does 99.99% on cyst and other things your worry about. We only put the glass dispenser faucet on this filter. In July we completed a freezer installation in the galley. We put it in the dead space in the forward corner of the galley counter where there was a second opening for "?". We also took a day trip to Kelley's Island, but it was a busy weekend, and there were no slips to be had, even for lunch. In August we again took a vacation to the north, and up the Detroit and St Clair Rivers. We stayed in Milliken State Park Marina in Detroit again. We passed through the green algae bloom in Lake Erie on our way. In our wake it looked like the liquid with light foam that you get when you mix lime jello. We got to Port Huron State Marina, and made our way to Harbor Beach. Learned not to plot nav courses on the Garmin in large scale as we drove into a shallow rock garden about 10 miles south of Harbor Beach. Good thing that Lake Huron has very clear water. We found a nav buoy about 2 miles off shore after we turned out of the underwater rock garden. We were headed to Tawas City above Saginaw Bay, but Harbor Beach was as far as we got. The weather deteriorated to high winds with afternoon TS. We turned around the next day and came back to Port Huron. We apparently just missed a bad TS while coming back down Lake Huron. We made the journey on Friday straight from Port Huron to PC. Lake Erie was smooth again which aided good speed. We did two more day trips, and our last project for the summer included completing sensors for level on the water and holding tanks. We started this project before the vacation to Lake Huron, but the Holding tank sensor only worked to 1/4 at first. A call to Tank Sensor gave us a cure. I crawled into the lazarette with the router, and cut reliefs of 1/16th inch in the tank where the sensors mounted. Everything worked great after this. We never tried the dinghy davits after our experience in June. We figured it was too hard to get  the dinghy on, but we could launch it if we had to. The boat went into its winter storage on 31 October.