The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

The Five Great Lakes

Tucked into the heart of North America, five hundred miles from the sea, lies one of the world’s great adventure cruising grounds. A quarter-million square kilometres of water, and seventeen thousand kilometres of coastline, call out to sailors seeking a season or two off the beaten path.

Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Ontario are, by salinity, freshwater lakes. By character, though, they are inland seas, stretching beyond a vanishing horizon and offering sailing challenges (and rewards) that are unique in the world.

Planning


The majority of yachts to be found on the Great Lakes have their home base somewhere on the system, and may never leave it. The lakes are, however, fully accessible to ocean-going yachts, via the locks and canals of the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Should your draught be less than five feet, and your mast foldable or easily un-steppable, the smaller historic canals of New York and Ontario become available as well.

Charted distances, on these lakes, can be deceiving when you sit down to plan your cruise. While the distance-over-the-ground from Anticosti Island at the mouth of the St. Lawrence to Duluth at the far tip of Superior is a mere 1,600 miles, few (if any) yachts make the trip up and back in a single season. This region is best explored slowly, a day at a time, leaving ample room in the schedule for weather and unexpected changes.

The sailing season starts in early April for hardy folks, or in late May for those without AAC-quality foul weather gear. The lower lakes remain sparsely utilized until July, when an explosion of small pleasure craft swarm out from the bustling cities of the southern lakes. By August, transient slips and good anchoring spots in the bigger cities are hard to come by, and the horizon is dotted with hundreds of sails.

Farther up the system, on Huron and Superior, even the “busy” season is hardly worthy of the name. You’ll see other boats, from time to time, but under circumstances quite the opposite of Lake Ontario’s annual three-month COLREGS test.

August and September, with few insects and generally favourable weather, are the favoured season for exploring Superior and Huron. Haul-out season starts in early October, and any boats still in the water by the beginning of November are likely to spark considerable local gossip about the competence and mental integrity of the skipper.

With the boat safely on the hard somewhere on the upper Great Lakes, winter provides a welcome opportunity for sailors to take a break from the water-borne life until the spring thaw comes and it’s time to start the journey back to the sea.

Weather

The Lakes are difficult to model accurately in weather simulations. While the same raw GFS and ECMWF data that ocean skippers are used to using is just as valid on average over large areas in the Great Lakes, small-scale variations are often much larger. It is, therefore, important to review local forecasts as well.

In general, I like to check both the raw model data and at least two independently interpreted forecasts from it, both the night before and the morning of a trip out on the lakes. If both model runs and both forecasts are consistent, that’s a good sign. Frequently, the model data for the specific grid cell in question will change considerably, and different forecast sources will disagree. That’s usually a sign of a chaotic effect at a scale too small for the global models to capture, but large enough to affect the conditions we’ll experience once we get out there. In such cases, we may change our planned destination for the day, or even stay put.

With such complicated water-land-weather couplings, the conditions can change quickly, so we keep tabs on the Environment Canada marine forecast on the VHF WX bands every hour or so. On a couple of occasions, a sudden change in that forecast has alerted us to head for a harbour a few miles away while facing only 1-2 foot chop, and we’ve arrived just in time for the whitecaps to start breaking as the club racers take in their second reef.

A cruising sailor on the Great Lakes should be prepared for any temperature and any amount of precipitation. It’s quite common to have one’s morning beverage while wearing a double layer of polar fleece, then swim and sunbathe nude at lunch, before tossing on insulated foul-weather gear for an afternoon rainstorm, followed three hours later by a T-shirt and shorts for sundowners.

Water Levels

Great Lakes cruising presents a welcome break from worrying about tides and tidal currents. That worry is, instead, replaced by worrying about water levels. The offset between chart datum and true water level varies dramatically from year to year; while all the lakes are affected, Huron is particularly notorious for having bad low-water years. It’s critical to check both the current and forecasted water levels, and to be sure that you know the correct offset relative to the datum of the charts you’re using.

Tactics

As expansive as the Great Lakes are, they’re tiny in comparison to the ocean. Open-water tactics are, therefore, often ineffective or dangerous. Large enough to breed serious storms, and small enough to ensure a rocky lee shore is always at hand, the lakes have claimed at least six thousand shipwrecks since written record-keeping began in earnest in the 17th century. Superior, in particular, is fond of snapping 700-foot freighters in half; the infamous Edmund Fitzgerald was just one of 240 ships lost within a day’s sail of Whitefish Bay.

A yacht on the open ocean might go five hundred miles out of its way to avoid a storm system that was clearly identified five days in advance. The same yacht on Superior might have only a day’s notice of an impending gale, and changing course by five miles would put it high and dry in a bear-infested forest.

Similarly, the series drogue—every AAC skipper’s favourite way of riding out a blow in blue water—might suddenly become firmly snagged to the bottom, with catastrophic consequences, if deployed in a Lake Erie gale. Should the drogue remain free, a shift of just a few degrees in the wind angle could drive the mostly-unsteerable boat ashore.

Only one Great Lakes storm tactic has survived the test of time: Always have a massive top-quality anchor ready on the bow, and a safe course to a sheltered anchorage plotted and ready to lay in. The moment the weather forecast turns unfavourable, make a beeline for that anchorage and drop the hook. Most yachts on the Lakes spend most of their time within sight of shore; passages out in the open are reserved only for the very best weather windows.

Before & After

A season on the Great Lakes segues nicely with several other popular cruising plans. The Great Loop route, popular with American and Canadian motor yachts,  combines a Great Lakes cruise with the Mississippi, Tenn-Tom, Intracoastal, Erie, Rideau, and Trent-Severn waterways and canals. While fascinating for some, this route is rather busy and developed; in addition, while most cruising sailboats will find sufficient water below the keel, air draught limits on some of the canals will usually call for unstepping the mast.

High-latitude sailors may bookend a Great Lakes season via the St. Lawrence with a period on the Newfoundland & Labrador coast and another one in Nova Scotia & New England; in this case, the boat can generally be kept in full sailing trim the entire time.

Bottom line, don’t sell the Great Lakes short as a cruising destination just because the water is fresh.

Comments

Have you cruised the Great Lakes? Please share your experiences in a comment.

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Stein Varjord

Hi Matt,
Interesting new knowledge for me. Your article made me explore the lakes via Google earth. The lakes do indeed look like they need a lot of time for proper exploration. I’ve never sailed them, and Amsterdam isn’t next door, but I will consider one of the rounds you mentioned. I’m always intrigued by what is new to me. I assume that is true for most here, but that you will still not get too many comments. Maybe partly due to easter, but also because there are no tech to nerd out over. I’m certainly guilty. 🙂

Marc Dacey

Matt, thanks for a nice “familiarization” piece for our “low seas”. Stein, the Great Lakes are a treasure and yet offer their own complexities in their own way. Lee shores and (in Lake Erie) comparatively shallow depths present considerations that would be familiar to Baltic sailors, I suppose, but Lake Superior is vast, deep and cold, with few harbours of refuge.

One thing sailors on Lake Ontario learn to do is to look southwestward to westward (the prevailing wind directions) on hot summer days. Squalls here (and on all the Great Lakes) can form with exceptional rapidity and can be very intense if the land to windward is hot enough. In fact, the strongest winds in which I have actively sailed have been within 10 NM of my home port (68 knots sustained). Fortunately, this sort of weather does not last long, but it underlines the need for bulletproof ground tackle.

James Evans

I’ll second Marc’s comments on thunder squalls: at the first sign of a thunderstorm my first reaction after years on the Lakes in small cruising boats is still to want to drop all sail immediately. It’s taken fifteen years on the East Coast to get less cautious! It’s not only good ground tackle that’s needed, but a watchful weather eye. The squalls are usually soon over, though. Interestingly, the only place I’ve encountered thunder squalls forming with the same speed and intensity is in the Baltic.

Marc Dacey

I raced in the squall-plagued Lake Ontario 300 in 2010 and I would say that both making use of the wind and avoiding it entirely are valid options, depending on the boat. But your comments hold for either end of Lake Ontario, save we tend to get a little less warning when the squalls “fall off” the Niagara Escarpment and thump us with five to 10 minutes’ warning on a hot day.

Jean-Philippe Gervais

I have sailed part of the Great lakes one september some 35 years ago on a totally unprepared trip from the Georgian Bay to Toronto and I have to agree wholeheartedly with the unpredictability of the weather. Also on the fact that my Atlantic ocean-honed instincts where of little use when the sh*t hit the fan (because of course it did !) in the confined space that is lake Erie.
Pro-tip to add to the list : make sure you are cleared visa-wise (as a person and if your country of origin demands it) for BOTH Canada and the US so as to be able to seek shelter in any port and not just on one side of the waterways. Believe me, it’s well worth the hassle.

David Lochner

Clearing customs from the US to Canada has always been fairly easy. Go to a Port of entry, call in and answer a few questions.

In the US, believe it or not, CBP has been making progress. In many customs districts you can use the ROAM app to clear in. The Buffalo District (Erie, Ontario, and St. Lawrence River) allows use of the ROAM app. Last summer I cleared into the US as soon as I got reliable cell coverage. No muss, no fuss.

https://www.cbp.gov/travel/pleasure-boats-private-flyers/pleasure-boat-overview/roam

Jean-Philippe Gervais

My problem was that, as a frenchman without a visa for entering the US (I never intended to set foot on american soil in the first place and didn’t have the time to apply for one anyway before boarding my flight to Canada), I was denied stay when we took refuge in Ashtabula (Ohio) after being dismasted in a severe thunderstorm. Everything went smoothly for my Canadian crew but because of me, the custom officer wanted to send us back out into the storm right away and I had a hell of a time negotiating a 24 hours respite.
Thankfully for me, that was in the mid-80’s and not post 9-11 or I don’t know how the situation would have ended.

Dick Stevenson

Hello Jean-Philippe,
I am sorry for what happened to you in the US with our border control officialdom. I think I have visited by boat around 40 countries now and I have had some, few actually, challenging interactions. But I am clear, as much as I think some country’s have difficult rules, no other country comes close to being as difficult as the US, if reports from friends and acquaintances are any indication. And these extremely challenging, sometimes arbitrary and impossible to execute, rules etc. came way before 9-11.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy

Dick Stevenson

Hi Matt,
Heading your way in the next season or so and find your article a wonderful teaser. In my youth I spent part of every summer on the S shore of Lake Superior and I can attest that it is, indeed, a superior body of water.
And, also, an anecdote to support your weather observations. We did canoe trips along the Lake Superior shore upon occasion. This area was “scalloped”: rocky points with the deep bights sporting lovely sand beaches.
After following the shoreline for a couple of these scallops, I proposed, as a sassy know-it-all ~~12 year old (or so) that it would be much quicker (read easier for me) to paddle point to point rather than following the shore line. Our guide said “no” and went on the explain that midway we would be a mile or two offshore and that would not be enough time to get to shore if a Lake Superior storm came up. I thought he was way over-cautious and we could surely get to shore in a canoe safely if the weather turned.
On another lovely calm day, a year or so later, I was paddling at a rocky point when I noticed the weather deteriorating. We had about ½ mile of rocky shore that would not be fun to see close hand before we got to the beach. Within minutes of seeing clouds develop, the wind came and minutes later the waves kicked up to a point hard to not get thrown around in our canoe. We made it to the beach past the rocks, got sopping wet in a cold rain and wind (no thunder and lightning) , and 20-30 minutes later we were on our way again, our clothes drying under a warm sun.
BTW, my (limited) take on the S shore of Lake Superior is that there are few bolt holes, at least west of Marquette where I am most familiar.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy