42°38′10″ N 82°29′47″ W

Sept 17 – Port Lambert Encarte Marina

I left Colchester at 7:00am Sunday morning & arrived at Port Lambert at 5:30pm.

There was a beautiful sunrise behind me to light the way & burn off the light mist on the water.

This was an interesting & challenging segment of my trip to Goderich.

• Lake Erie to the Detroit River;
• Detroit River past Detroit & Windsor to Lake St. Clair;
• Lake St. Clair to the St. Clair River;
• St. Clair River to the south end of Lake Huron.

Colchester is very close to the western end of Lake Erie. Within an hour I was entering the Detroit River & my speed immediately dropped from 6.5 to 4.5 knots because of the current of the river flowing into Lake Erie. I also started to encounter large freighters. Thankfully most of them were headed in the other direction.

It wasn’t too long before the shoreline along the US side of the river was built up with power plants & many heavy industries.

Some of these facilities looked like something out of a Dickens novel.

By noon I was almost at the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor & Detroit. It was an impressive view but unfortunately I didn’t have much time to enjoy it because of all the boat traffic on the water.

This part of the river also has a lot of current & turbulence so even though I was more or less traveling in a straight line it was not possible to use the auto-helm because it couldn’t make changes fast enough to maintain my course.

Downtown Detroit’s skyline is impressive with multiple “art deco” style hi-rise buildings. Windsor’s waterfront is modest by comparison but is beautifully developed with lots of parks, walking & bike paths. It also wasn’t hard to tell which side of the river was Canadian.

The weather was fantastic for mid-September Sunday afternoon & apparently hundreds of other boaters felt the same way because the river was jammed with all sizes of pleasure boats.

I encountered more “traffic” on this segment of my journey than I saw anywhere else on the trip from Florida – even when we went through New York City & the Hudson River!

By 2:00 I was finally past Detroit/Windsor & entering Lake St. Clair. Thankfully the pleasure craft traffic thinned out as well.

Crossing Lake St. Clair was relatively uneventful except that I met two freighters & was passed by another two freighters. The lake is relatively shallow & there is a deepened channel that crosses the lake for freighters to use. I set my course to travel parallel to the outside the channel so I didn’t have to worry about the freighter traffic.

I was quite intimated the first few times that I encountered freighters but after meeting & being passed by several of them it was much easier to be within a hundred feet of them. Plus, these big boats hardly generate any wake compared to most of the large powerboats that I was encountering.

Once I entered the St. Clair River I was back into pleasure boat chaos topped up with more freighter traffic! Thankfully I only had to endure this for a couple more hours before I arrived at my marina for the night.

It was only 5:30 in the afternoon by the time I was tied up to the dock but I was pooped from all the steering & concentration. Hopefully Monday will be an “easier” day.

Cheers!