Getting Breaking Awave home didn’t mean the preparation was finished. In many ways, that was when the real preparation began.

Now we had to learn our own boat: how she handled, how her systems worked, what equipment we could rely on, what we needed to change, and what living aboard would actually require once we left for months rather than a weekend.

So we started using her.

Our First Preparation Cruise

Traverse City → Charlevoix → St. Ignace → Beaver Island → Traverse City

One of our first substantial trips took us from Traverse City to Charlevoix for two nights, then to St. Ignace for two nights, then to Beaver Island for a night before returning to Traverse City.

That trip gave us a much more realistic sense of what it would be like to live and travel aboard for several days at a time. It also started teaching us just how much there was to learn about the systems on our own boat.

Traverse City → Charlevoix

Charlevoix gave us one of our first lessons in the difference between simply operating a boat and actually knowing the boat you own.

One evening we had been at Marek’s Harbor Grill, having drinks and listening to a great band, and returned to Breaking Awave to discover alarms going off. At that stage of boat ownership, an alarm still had a remarkable ability to make us assume something catastrophic was happening.

The problem turned out to be much less dramatic—but very educational. We had used the shower without realizing that the circuit powering the shower-water system wasn’t on. The pump therefore wasn’t moving the water as it should, water eventually overflowed into the bilge, and the alarm let us know that something wasn’t right.

That was where Tim Weiringa, Breaking Awave’s prior owner, became one of our most valuable resources. We called Tim, described what we were seeing, and he helped us understand what had happened and how the system was supposed to work.

It would be far from the last time.

Tim has been incredibly gracious about answering what must feel like thousands of questions as we’ve learned the boat. Sometimes something stopped working and we needed help figuring out why. Other times we simply needed to understand what a particular switch, breaker, pump or system was supposed to do. Even much later, when we were working through questions involving shore power, the inverter, electrical circuits and other systems, Tim was still someone we could call for the history of how Breaking Awave had been operated and what he had experienced with her.

There is a lot you can learn from manuals, training and trial and error. But there is also something pretty invaluable about being able to call the person who knew your particular boat for years and ask:

“Tim…what is it doing now?”

Charlevoix → St. Ignace

From Charlevoix, we continued north to St. Ignace.

By then we were beginning to settle into a rhythm—travel, dock, get the boat secured, figure out where everything was, work when we needed to, and then actually enjoy where we had landed.

St. Ignace also introduced us to one of the less glamorous realities of cruising at exactly the wrong time of year: midges.

A fresh hatch was underway, and they seemed to be everywhere. By the time we were ready to leave, Breaking Awave was covered with them. It was not exactly the postcard version of boating we had imagined.

A Magical Day on Mackinac Island

From St. Ignace, we left Breaking Awave at the marina and took the ferry over to Mackinac Island.

We spent the first part of the day doing what you’re supposed to do on Mackinac: we rented bikes and rode around the island, stopped for lunch at the Pink Pony, and generally enjoyed having nowhere in particular we needed to be.

At some point we decided to take a look at the Grand Hotel. There is normally an admission charge for visitors who aren’t staying there, but somehow we managed to slip past the entrance without attracting much attention and took our own quick tour.

While we were there, we asked whether it would be possible to come back for dinner that evening.

It was.

There was just one small problem.

We had arrived on Mackinac Island dressed for a bike ride, and dinner at the Grand Hotel required something considerably different. Greg needed a jacket and tie, and Julie needed something appropriate for the evening.

So our casual day on Mackinac suddenly turned into a shopping mission.

We found Rustic Chic Boutique and spent what was probably an hour or two finding everything we needed—and inevitably a few things we probably didn’t. By the time we were finished, we had managed to assemble complete outfits for dinner.

Rather than ferry back to St. Ignace, change and return, we simply changed into our new clothes there and headed back to the Grand Hotel.

What had started as a bike ride around the island turned into one of our favorite evenings of the trip. We had drinks at the hotel before dinner—actually managing to visit both bars—and then had a wonderful dinner with a window view overlooking the porch and grounds.

The whole evening felt wonderfully spontaneous. We had arrived that morning with no intention of doing any of it, and a few hours later we were dressed up and having dinner at the Grand Hotel.

Eventually, of course, we still had to get back to the boat.

That meant taking the ferry back to St. Ignace in our newly purchased dinner clothes and then making the roughly 25-minute walk from the ferry back to the marina.

Through the midges.

They had not taken the evening off.

So after this beautiful dinner at the Grand Hotel, there we were walking back to Breaking Awave in our nice clothes while clouds of midges surrounded us.

It was a pretty perfect combination of the two sides of cruising we were beginning to discover: one moment can feel remarkably elegant, and twenty minutes later you’re just trying to get back to the boat without swallowing a bug.

St. Ignace → Beaver Island

From St. Ignace, we headed to Beaver Island.

Unfortunately, the midges apparently had similar travel plans. By then we joked that we felt like Pigpen from Peanuts, cruising along with our own little cloud of bugs following us from stop to stop.

It was funny in retrospect, but it was also one of those early cruising lessons you don’t really anticipate while sitting at home planning a trip. Sometimes the thing you remember most isn’t the big scenic moment—it’s the completely unexpected nuisance that becomes the running joke of the whole week.

When Hotspots Weren’t Enough

That first cruise also exposed one of the biggest weaknesses in our original plan: internet connectivity.

We both intended to continue handling business responsibilities while cruising, and we initially assumed that phone hotspots would probably be enough.

They weren’t.

Weak cellular coverage and dropped connections interrupted Teams meetings and phone calls. Suddenly, connectivity wasn’t just a convenience—it was something we needed to solve before leaving for the Loop.

That experience eventually led us toward a much more capable onboard setup using a Peplink router, multiple cellular options, and Starlink. But even that became another learning process. We had to understand power requirements, networking, onboard Wi-Fi, and how all of the different systems would work together.

By the time we returned to Traverse City, the cruise had done exactly what we needed it to do: we had gone somewhere, enjoyed the places along the way, and come home with another list of things we now understood better than when we left.

Power Island: A Dinghy Test That Taught Us a Lot

Before our next longer cruise, we decided to take the dinghy out to Power Island. The idea was simple: test the dinghy, practice using it from Breaking Awave, get in some anchoring practice and enjoy the island.

Getting the dinghy down with the davit went fine. Starting the outboard did not.

We pulled and pulled and could not get the Honda to start. Eventually, we called Tim, who reminded us that the kill-switch lanyard needed to be connected for the engine to run.

By that point, Greg had already improvised with a zip tie. Not exactly the recommended solution.

We did briefly picture what would happen if we somehow fell overboard and the dinghy continued circling Power Island without us. Fortunately, that particular lesson remained theoretical, and we now always use the proper lanyard.

Once the engine finally started, we headed toward shore. Power Island has plenty of large rocks around it, so as we got closer we tried to be cautious. We shut the engine off, tilted the outboard up and paddled the rest of the way toward shore with the one oar that happened to be in the dinghy.

It was awkward, but it worked.

We made it ashore, tied the dinghy to a tree and had a great hike around the island. It was quiet, undeveloped and exactly the kind of place we had hoped the dinghy would allow us to explore.

Leaving was where the next lesson arrived.

We paddled away from shore and decided we were probably far enough out to lower the engine and drive the rest of the way.

We weren’t.

The prop clipped a submerged rock, and that was the end of the outboard helping us get back to Breaking Awave.

Julie initially thought she could simply swim the dinghy back to the boat. It looked much closer than it actually was. After a while, Greg joined the effort by paddling with our one lonely oar.

We eventually made it back.

We have since added a second oar.

And the fun still wasn’t over.

By then it had gotten later in the day and other boats were leaving the area, throwing wakes through the anchorage. As we tried to reconnect the dinghy’s lifting harness to the davit, Breaking Awave began rolling.

The heavy hook at the end of the lifting line swung dangerously close to one of the boat’s side windows. Then, after we got the dinghy connected and partially lifted, the wakes caused it to begin swinging and banging toward the side of the boat.

Things went from controlled to chaotic very quickly.

We lowered the dinghy back into the water, waited for the wakes to settle, regrouped and then tried again. The next attempt worked.

It was a lot of learning packed into one afternoon: the kill switch, operating around rocks, carrying enough paddles, protecting the prop, reconnecting the lifting harness and understanding how much harder davit work becomes when the boat is rolling.

And that was exactly why we were glad we did it before we actually needed the dinghy somewhere unfamiliar.

We had a great day at Power Island, got ourselves and the dinghy safely back aboard, and came away with a much better understanding of what we needed to do differently next time.

Our Second Preparation Cruise

Traverse City → Escanaba → High Island → Traverse City

The next day, we left for our second substantial preparation cruise.

This one would take us on a full-day crossing to Escanaba, which felt like another step forward for us. Instead of moving between relatively nearby ports, we were spending most of the day underway and getting more experience managing the boat, navigating for hours at a time and settling into what a real cruising day felt like.

Once we reached Escanaba, we were able to spend time with family and friends who live there. That was another glimpse of what we hoped the Great Loop could become—not simply traveling from marina to marina, but using the boat as a way to reconnect with people and places along the route.

And, of course, the Power Island lesson followed us. The dinghy’s damaged prop needed attention, and once we were back in Traverse City Greg would replace the shear pin that had done exactly what it was designed to do when the prop hit the rock. Several of the dinghy’s grab handles and D-ring attachment points also needed repair, so those later became part of the growing preparation list.

Escanaba → High Island

On the way back from Escanaba, we planned to anchor overnight at High Island.

Looking at the chart, it seemed like the bay would give us good protection from the northeast winds, which were forecast to blow around 15–20 mph overnight.

What the chart didn’t really communicate was that the “protection” to our north was mostly a low sandbar. There were no trees, no real elevation and not nearly as much shelter as we had imagined.

We were also still pretty new to anchoring. We could probably have gone farther in and gotten at least a little more protection closer to land, but another boat was already sitting in the spot that looked best.

So we anchored where we were.

That night was miserable. The wind and waves kept Breaking Awave rocking and pitching for hours, and neither of us got much sleep. At about 2:30 in the morning, Julie asked whether we should just pull the anchor and head back.

At the time, it honestly felt like maybe we should.

But we stayed.

By morning, of course, everything had changed. The water was almost completely calm, the island looked beautiful, and we sat on the bow drinking coffee and wondering how the same place could feel so different just a few hours later.

We were exhausted, but it was a beautiful morning, and the nicer conditions made heading home considerably easier.

The bigger lesson came afterward.

We realized we probably should have run a little faster earlier in the crossing, even if it meant burning more fuel, and pushed on to Garden Island instead. There was an anchorage on the south side that would have given us much better protection from the northeast wind.

That night taught us several things at once: charts don’t always tell the whole story, not all “shelter” is equal, anchoring position matters, and sometimes a little extra fuel is a very reasonable trade for a much better night’s sleep.

By the time we returned to Traverse City, we had more hours aboard, more experience operating the boat and—predictably—another short list of things to fix, change or buy.

What the Preparation Cruises Taught Us

Those trips were about much more than just adding miles.

We became more familiar with the navigation electronics and autopilot. We learned more about the boat’s electrical and mechanical systems. We experimented with storage and how to make the limited space work. We dealt with connectivity, power, appliances, and the dozens of small practical details that only become obvious once you are actually living aboard.

We also learned how Breaking Awave behaved in different wind and wave conditions. We practiced docking, line handling, marina approaches, anchoring, dinghy operations and longer passages. We discovered equipment we needed, equipment we didn’t, and plenty of small things that seemed insignificant until we actually had to use them aboard.

Each trip was a little different.

Sometimes we were learning about the boat. Sometimes we were learning about weather. Sometimes we were troubleshooting technology or figuring out how to make the space work better. Sometimes we were learning that one oar really wasn’t enough.

And sometimes the most important thing we were learning was simply how to settle into life aboard and enjoy being there.

That became the real purpose of these preparation cruises. We weren’t trying to eliminate every possible problem before leaving—something we were quickly learning would be impossible.

We were trying to build enough experience that when something unexpected happened, it wouldn’t be the first time we had ever needed to figure something out aboard a boat.

By the time we finally pointed Breaking Awave toward the Great Loop, we still had an enormous amount left to learn.

But we had gone from reading about the Loop, to experiencing life aboard someone else’s boat, to formal training, to cruising independently, to buying our own boat, and then spending months learning how to make her work for the life we were about to live.

That felt like enough to leave the dock.