Les Cheneaux Antique Wooden Boat Show

The annual boat show held at the Hessel marina in August is a fine display of wooden boats and one of our favorite festivales. Of course, there are plunty of booths selling other things but the spotlight is the boats.

Most of the boats are made by Chris Craft with boats from the early 1900's to the 1970's in attendance. The owners of many of these boats have spent hundreds or thousands of hours in the boats restoration. And they look it. Some of them are better than new.

Speaking of new, we discovered that you can buy a brand new custom version of these fine wood boats if you have the cash. Hacker Craft makes hand made reproductions and had one on display at the show. If you have a spare $170,000, one can be yours! By the way, that's for a 22 footer.

So it's time for some pictures.

Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum

The museum is located northwest of Sault St Marie and is located on the grounds of the Whitefish Point Light Station. The museum is one of several that pay tribute to sailors lost in the Great Lakes. It has been an eye opener as to how many ships and boats that have been lost to the lakes. Most people are familiar with the most famous sinking (in our times), the Edmund Fitzgerald, but there have been hundreds of sinkings over the last 200+ years, sometimes with the loss of more lives than the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The musem highlights several of the shipwrecks but contains an item that is of special interest to your photographer. A fresnel lens from a lighthouse. I think these lenses are artwork. Hopefully the pictures here will be of good enough quality to back that up.

Cedarville RV Resort

This is our 3rd stay at the Cedarville RV Resort. The campground is right on the waters of Lake Huron and is very picturesque. For the week we were there the resort was full, a product of the Boat Show weekend. The photo's from our campsite are actually on Lake Huron but appear to be a smaller body of water due to the water curling around the campground forming a small bay.
It is very quiet here. The villages of Hessel, Cedarville, and DeTour have populations of a few hundred each but the area is a boaters dream. From Cedarville eastward to Detour there are miles of pristine shoreline- a rarity in the US these days.

I'm guessing the winters have contributed to the lack of developing along the shoreline.

That's a good thing.

Cedarville, DeTour, and Sault St. Marie

Well it has been a while since the last post primarily due to a poor internet connection. The wifi at the Wild Cherry Resort near Suttons Bay is usually good, but we took a week and traveled over the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula and had no internet connection. So this post starts a series of catch-up posts.

The main reason for the trip, was to go to the Les Cheneaux Islands Antique Wooden Boat Show that is held at the marina in Hessel, MI. The show is held annually the 2nd weekend of August. We attended the show a couple of years ago and were quite impressed with the quality of the boats. More on this in a later post.

To get to the Upper Peninsula (UP) from northern Michigan requires a drive accross the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge is 5 miles long and rises 199 feet above the water. Lots of steel cable was used to construct this suspension bridge- 42,000 miles worth to be exact. Those cables weigh over 23 million pounds and the bridge total weight is over 2 billion pounds. All this to go across the Straits of Mackinac. It is one impressive structure. Here are bridge pictures of our crossing.


Our campground was located in Cedarville about 4 miles from Hessel the location of the boat show. Cedarville makes for a good central location for exploration. One of the side trips took us to the Village of DeTour located at the east end of the UP. Traveling farther east than DeTour requires a ferry ride to Drummond Island. We have done that in the past and decided to not take the ridethis time. A couple of pictures of the ferry tells the tale.
Another side trip was a drive to Sault St.Marie and a visit to the locks on the St. Marys river. We always enjoy watching the ships "locking through" the locks. We lucked out as we got to see 2 ships lock through within 2 hours.

The first photo's show the empty lock, a ship entering, and the ship fully in the lock. This ship is 712 feet long and 72 feet wide. The second ship pictured is one of the Great Lakes big boys. It is 1000 feet long and 105 feet wide. This is the first time that we have had the chance to see one of the big ones- what a sight. Click on the full length view for a good look.

Bay View and Castle Farms

This past weekend we pulled up stakes and moved the motorhome to Petoskey, MI for the weekend. It is about a 2 hour drive from Suttons Bay northward up the coast and takes you through the small city of Charlevoix.

Charlevoix sits between Lake Michigan and Lake Charlevoix. The city is one of those picturesque places that makes the local chamber of commerce's job easy. It looks great from any angle. The main street through town is lined with flowers, the businesses all face and partially surround the bay, and the recently updated city marina is close to the restaurants. To draw a better mental image, imagine the main street running north with the businesses and restaurants (several with outside seating) on the west side of the street. On the east side of the street the city has a narrow city park area with benches. Right at the park area is the marina, so when you are seated at an outside eatery you can gaze past the flowers to the boats that are only about 150 feet away. Very nice indeed.

So where are the pictures you may ask? Well, Charlevoix was in the middle of a celebration and street fair, so there was no parking available for anything the size of our motorhome. We hope to return to Charlevoix for pictures before we leave Michigan.

We arrived in Petoskey and set up shop in the Petoskey KOA (Kampgrounds of America). The campground was absolutely packed with campers and RVers. Each campsite was equipped with at least 8 kids and all their toys. Each evening the campers fired up their camp fires and created so much smoke we thought the campground would make the TV news as a wildfire. We were glad to stay only 3 nights at the KOA.

We did go to the adjacent community of Bay View, MI. Bay View has many old homes worthy of a stroll and viewing. We had a pleasent smoke free walk and aquired a few photo's. Here are some examples of the homes in the area.
We also made a trip to a place called Castle Farms.

Castle Farms is styled after midevel-style castles and although it is modernized, you can see the influence. There was a Fiber Arts Festival in progress at the facility which included all kinds of spinning related gear and supplies, a sheep herding dog demonstration, live entertainment, etc. The sheep herding dogs were something to see- those dogs are remarkable.

Castle Farms:



After our weekend trip to the Petosky area, we returned to Suttons Bay and the Wild Cherry resort.

We will now have to relax and recover from our KOA experience.

Old Mission Peninsula

Have I mentioned that this area is really a neat place? Well we continued our exploration by taking a trip to another nearby peninsula, the Old Mission Peninsula.

A few posts ago I provided some maps to pinpoint our location. If you were to go back to those maps you can locate the Old Mission Peninsula. The one map points to our location on the Leelanau Peninsula. Looking to the right (east) of the Leelanau Peninsula, and extending northward from Traverse City, is the Old Mission Peninsula.

The maritime influence is strong here just as it is throughout the region. There are small marinas all along the shoreline. Homeowners all along the shoreline have beautiful views out on the water and many have their own docks.

Old Mission Peninsula resembles the Leelanau Peninsula in the fact that the interior regions contain the cherry orchards as well as vineyards. Both peninsulas are similar in respect with a narrow coastal region that immediately turns into hills as you go inland.

We enjoyed the scenery so much, I didn't take pictures until we got to the end of the peninsula and found the lighthouse at the end of the road. An old log home was there also, so I did take photo's there.

Harvest Time

Harvest time has come to the Wild Cherry Resort. It involves an interesting process.

Some unusual equipment is used to get the cherries to drop off the tree. The harvesting machine reaches out with an arm that grabs the tree while some angled panels also extend under the tree. The operator then activates the "arms" which then shake the beegees out of the tree. The high speed shaking causes the cherries to come loose and fall onto the angled panels,and then roll to the bottom of the panels. At the bottom of the angled panels is a conveyor belt which transports the cherries up to a container that has water. The water is used to cushion the cherries falling into the container. A worker stands at the container and uses a racquet ball racquet to fish out leaves and twiggs that also fall off the tree. When the container is full a tractor takes the full container away and places a new container in place. Hopefully the following pictures will tell the tale better than my description.

The harvest period for the farmers is a very busy time indeed. It involves many hours in the orchards from daylight to midnight on some days.


I get tired just watching them.