8/17/11 - 8/20/11 A nice little town called Little Current separates Georgian Bay from the North Channel. We stopped for provisions, anchored out and then came back in the morning to attend a radio show for cruisers. We spent the next several days cruising the channel. It is similar to Georgian Bay but easier to anchor and I enjoyed it more. It was late in the afternoon when we came across the U.S. border. We weren't up to continuing on for another hour to make it to Drummond Island, which is the customs port, so we put up our yellow quarantine flag (indicating that we had not cleared customs) and anchored for the night. I forgot to put on the anchor light which may have had something to do with the visit we got from U.S. Customs / Border Protection. They woke us up at 10pm and after waiting for us to get dressed put two officers aboard to check our documents and a brief search of the boat. We know the drill since we have been boarded twice before but not in the night. They were very pleasant but cautioned us about not showing a light. The next day we went into Drummond and cleared customs without incident. It felt good to be back in our home country and we went to DeTour Marina, Michigan. DeTour is the crossroads between Lake Michigan, Lake Huron and Lake Superior and quite a few freighters passed by us carrying corn, wheat, gravel, rock salt and taconite (processed iron ore). These freighters are up to 1000 feet long and work until the lakes freeze over. We took caution cruising these waters remembering the Edmund Fitzgerald, a 700 foot freighter that went down with all hands in November, 1975 after encountering 35 foot waves on Lake Superior. We attended church Sunday morning at Union Presbyterian in DeTour and departed to an anchorage near Government Island.
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