Yarg, Me Dinger is Gone!

Back from Wisconi.  I mean, really.  If you were a female (maybe you are), would you want to spend  eight days at home while your husband hosts Deer Camp?  Come on!  I can only hear the same buck story so many times!  But bless their hearts.  We got our meat for the year.  I will spare you any images of our nine hour butchering session yesterday... in the kitchen.

And the CH trails are still closed for hunting, so guess where I went today.  Up to Brockway's Nose!  It takes some ambition (or caffeine) to want to climb that steeply graded  hill.  Today I had both, so Duce and I went.

A pan of the town with a fresh dusting of snow

What a great walk.  I actually want to do that again soon!  And Duce posed nicely on our way back home.  Can you tell where we are?

My good boy sits so nice

Now let's rewind.  Wednesday, as I pedaled around town looking for my dog, I saw an interesting boat past the gap on Superior.  The drop in my gut told me what was going on.  I pedaled down to the Queen's dock, and looked for my bell buoy.

It was gone.

Sunofagun, I just went out the day before to make sure it was still there!  You took my buoy!  I screamed at the ship, nearly in tears.  In my eight years of living here, I have never seen the buoy drop in or get yanked out of its spot.  But the ship was heading west, and I knew what to do.

I flew home and checked the Marine Traffic site to make sure what I saw was real.  Yup, she was a Coast Guard boat labeled as a tender... going 6.6 knots.  I had time to spare, but I packed up for a trip to Eagle Harbor.  I was going to see what those buoy tenders do.

At the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse, I found a nice front row seat on a cold, wet, unyieldingly hard rock.  Anticipation rose as I watched the ship close in on the buoy.  I had my camera ready for you.

So I sat and waited and watched.  Oh, my.  I sat and shivered for an hour waiting for that tender to whisk that melodic three-toned buoy out of the Big Lake.  

And then it happened.

The buoy, lifted by ropes from a large crane, rose out of the water and timbered into the ship.  I tell you what.  I watched that crane the whole time, waiting for any movement.  The only thing that actually moved (from where I could see) was the cable connected to it.

I seriously sat there and recorded most of this process with my numb fingers holding the shaking camera as I shivered on an off-camber bolder of shore rock.  I didn't mind any of that.  But the lifting of the buoy was so anticlimactic from the camera's point of view that I rather not even waste the bandwidth uploading it.  You get my description and a picture instead.

The C.G. Alder full of local buoys

But hey, now I have officially witnessed the removal of a bell buoy.  One more item to cross off my bucket list!

Here is a picture of one of the older buoys displayed at the museum by the lighthouse.  Those things are way bigger than they look in the water.

Historic buoy at the Eagle Harbor Lighthouse Museum

Okay, now the sun came out.  After hearing about tomorrow's potential storm, I better get some vitamin D before it disappears for the winter.  I'm not joking, you know.