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Wednesday, May 31st, 2000 by Cary

We started the day anchored off the south shore of Bear Island in a protective cove. Got up at 7:00 a.m. and the sun was shining without a lot of clouds for the first time since we took off from Bayfield as you can see from some of the pictures. The wind looked good for some early morning sailing so instead of eating breakfast right away we made some coffee and decided to take advantage of the wind.

We weighed anchor at about 7:30 a.m. and set sail for Rocky Island. There were no sailboats in sight. We docked at a public docking on the west side of Rocky Island at about 10:30 a.m. to go ashore and to take advantage of the beautiful sunny day. By the time we docked the wind had about died down so it was perfect timing for landing.

We made some sandwiches and hiked across up and across Rocky Island to a lookout point about one half mile away. The trail through the woods was narrow and not frequently used as you can see from the photos. The lookout was merely some wooden timber fence overlooking the Apostle Islands with Devils Island the closest in view. We have not yet been to that Island. We ate a couple of sandwiches at that lookout and than headed back to the dock where the sailboat was tied up.

Heath worked on his thesis while I for the first time tried the dinghy and paddled along the shoreline. Because we heard the weather might be shifting during the night we decided to motor over to South Twin Island, which only took 10 minutes. Before we reached the island, we anchored out and cooked hamburgers and beans for supper and decided to anchor just inside of the bay for the night. The wind was starting to pick up and we tried to anchor with two anchors but one would not grab. It was digging into some sort of clay and kept dragging. So we decided to try and go inside or the leeward side of the dock closest to the shore. We measured the depth and found that the Macgregor 26X was perfect for the 2-3 foot depth of water. The shore line was maybe 15-20 feet away on the port side of the boat and the dock was on the starboard side. The lake bottom under the Macgregor was sand.

After tying up we explored the Island. There was an unoccupied Ranger house with a broken wind generator on the roof. But there were several solar panels on the roof and more located about 100 feet away in a small clearing in the woods behind the house. We had the whole Island to ourselves with no boats or humans in sight. We spent the evening relaxing and looking thru sailing magazines and finally turned in, exhausted, at about 10:00 P.M.

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