The Quest for Competency

Turns out not everything a person needs to know to run a boat safely on Lake Superior can be found in the owner's manual.

I can admit this now. When Jill and I first bought the Little Dipper, I was more than a little intimidated over the prospect of going too far out in the islands by myself, even of simply running a boat. Engines and gauges and switches, that did … I didn’t know what, wires that tangled like cursive writing in a language I did not, and maybe never could, understand. I was a novice and I knew it.

Competency has always been a quest for me when it comes to all things mechanical. I did not grow up in a family where the man, or anyone of the house for that matter, was omnipotent with tools. I recall my father once walking towards the sputtering washing machine with a fistful of mismatched tools and a paper bag “for the parts that I’ll probably have left over when I put the damn thing back together wrong,” he said with a straight face. In my home, there was no garage where the walls gleamed with every power tool known to humankind, no workshop where the very air was tinged with the almost sacred scent of sawdust and the celestial buzz of circular saws. Things mechanical were a mystery, something to be observed from a distance, with equal parts awe and trepidation, and then better left to other, more competent people. The only repair manual we had at our house was the Yellow Pages. We picked up the phone and called others to do the work.

So my first trips in the Little Dipper were dry runs, literally. Long before we put the boat in the water, I would sit in it while it was still on the trailer parked in the driveway and pretend, “visualize” you might call it. There are few boats on the water today more simple than the Little Dipper. Still, in the captain’s seat I would think through each process – starting the engine, preparing the instruments, tuning the radio, checking the running lights. What needed to be on? What needed to be off, or stowed or close at hand? How does the GPS work? The weather radio? I thought through every scenario in the flat calm of the driveway.

When we finally did launch her, the maiden voyages of the Little Dipper were short ones, very short. “Test runs” I told myself, just out to the south end Basswood, the closest point of the closest island to my home port of Bayfield.

I took it slow. Learned the boat. Learned my own limits, working my way slowly, a little further every trip, up the Basswood Island shoreline, a shoreline that most boaters just splatter with wake enroute to more exotic islands further out.

I drifted off the old quarry entrance trying to imagine the clatter of the rock cutters and the voices of the workers. I dared to test the anchor systems and swim into a few small caves on the eastern shoreline, caves so small there are barely visible from the water but gave me a feel for the swim and the dangers, surprised at the beauty to be found even there.

After the first couple of trips, I reached the northern tip of the island and a picturesque formation called Honeymoon Rock. In truth, it was a familiar spot where I had been before, once photographing the northern lights in a boat called the Rapture with my friend Mike Radtke and several other times with Michael DeWitt in his boat the Compromise while he and I drifted, waiting for the fog to clear, sipping coffee at what we jokingly came to call the Honeymoon Rock Coffeehouse.

But that was in other people’s boats. Now I was there on my own. It was not as wild or exotic as the distant islands with their endless blue horizons and that slow ache of distance, but it was enough. It was an island, one of the Apostle Islands, and I was there in my own boat.

Since then, I’ve ventured to the furthest reaches of the Apostle Islands, out where there is nothing between you and the next time zone except the thin blue line of the horizon, but I’ll leave those trips for other stories. Basswood Island was where it all started, the first small step in the giant leap of exploring the “far flung Apostle Islands.” It was there that I gained confidence, in my boat, and in myself. I learned what switches turned on what, how the engine should sound when you throttle up, what the gauges meant. Most importantly, I found that competence isn’t something you find in the owner’s manual. You earn it, slowly and on your own. I earned it in the protected waters and often overlooked shoreline of Basswood Island.

Even now when I could jet out to the distant islands and chase the unknown, sometimes I don't. Some mornings, I throttle back on my way up the North Channel and steer a course to Basswood instead, and to Honeymoon Rock, because sometimes it is enough to just be there, in my boat, in the islands, sipping my coffee, the only customer at the Honeymoon Rock Coffeehouse.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)