Fifth Day Observations

The weather people all said that we would have nice weather for the fifth full day of our vacation.

After so many mostly cloudy days punctuated with rain, we were kinda looking forward to that.

Alas, it was not to be....





Despite the gloom, we experienced our busiest day ever for visitors.

Here are the ones I managed to get pictures of:







We didn't get any pictures of the two deer we saw in the front yard of the house a few doors down to the east - nor did we get any pictures of the fox we saw wandering a condo development on the far side of Vermilion. We thought it was a dog at first. Although I'd never seen one before it became pretty obvious what it was as it darted across the street in front of us and disappeared behind some bushes. How odd to see my first one in a heavily developed area nestled between a very busy road and the lake.



I *did* manage to get a photo of these tracks on our beach - probably because they didn't try to run away from me:





I don't know what left them. They don't seem to match any of the tracks in my guidebooks. Unless someone tells me otherwise, I'm gonna say they were left by an extraterrestrial looking for women to nab and drag back to the home planet.



The animals (and possible aliens) weren't the only things that the weather failed to keep inside. I think we saw more boats go by on this day than on other other.

Here are some of them:























When the haze momentarily disappeared I also managed to get my best photo of Huron (still some 6 miles away):





This is what things looked like from our deck as afternoon turned into evening:



That tree line you might be able to see in the far distance might be Marblehead (16 miles away) and/or Kellys Island (20 miles away). I don't think it's Canada's Pelee Island (23+ miles away) but I suppose it's possible.

I thought I learned somewhere along the way that the horizon is more or less 18 miles away but of course a lot depends on A) Your height and B) The height of whatever might be projecting above the horizon. One site I found gives the formulas for figuring things out. Assuming that my eye was 30 feet above the level of the water, the horizon was a mere 6.4 nautical miles away - which seems terribly low to me, given my map calculations. Assuming that I was 40 feet up only boosts the distance to 7.4 nautical miles. Erggh....

Assuming that the trees on the islands were 50 feet tall, however, seems to mean that they could have been as far away as 16 nautical miles. Nautical miles are about 15% longer than regular miles, though, so... things still aren't working out right.

Maybe I was actually standing higher than I thought. Or maybe my map calculations are wrong. Or maybe the map makers and the formula posters and everyone else is part of a long-standing conspiracy by the rest of the world to keep me permanently uncertain of my location.

At least I'm on dry land and not out on the lake trying to find my way back to port....