The Manitou

Shore Magazine

Sailing the freshwater seas

Not long after the tall ship Manitou pushes away from the dock on West Grand Traverse Bay and points her bow toward open water, the vibrant sun forces its way through the clouds above, and Mother Nature offers us a strong northerly wind.

Heaving hand over hand, obeying command after command, the three-member crew hoists the Manitou’s sails high, and ties them so taut that barely a ripple appears in her 3,000 square feet of heavy canvas. They catch wind and she cruises forward at 12 knots. At the helm, Dave McGinnis smiles—the reaction of a captain the moment his ship finds its groove.

It’s a Friday morning in mid-September, just days before the fall equinox sheds leaves on a Midwestern summer that began late and will end soon. We are embarking on a four-day “Windjammer Cruise” from the northwest-lower Michigan tourism destination of Traverse City and to wherever the wind will take us. The guests on this weekend’s wine-tasting cruise include six middle-aged and retired couples, our aspiring sommelier and me. We sip strong coffee served in a hot pot on the port side of the ship and watch as Captain Dave and the crew practice the ancient craft of the mariner, which has been passed down through the ages.

“Stand by to tack,” Captain Dave announces as the Manitou nears the coast of the Leelanau Peninsula to the west. “Stand by to tack,” the crew dutifully responds and jumps to their battle stations. Because we’re sailing north, into a northerly wind, we have to sail at angles, west, then east, and “tack” back and forth when we near shore. This is the tortoise’s approach to the journey. We’re not moving fast. But slowly and steadily, we’ll get there.

McGinnis calls the Manitou a simple boat, without the complications of electrical or mechanical systems. “We’re trying to give people a taste of what it was like to sail on one of these boats one hundred years ago,” he says. “So simplicity is key. We don’t need generators and refrigerators and Cuisinarts on board. Her beauty is in her simplicity.”

The Manitou is a traditional gaff rig two-masted schooner, the likes of which once sailed up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1800s. She is 114 feet long, weighs 82 tons and was retrofitted with a steel hull in 1983 to preserve her lifespan. The Manitou boasts western red cedar masts, a deck made out of Douglas fir and a steering wheel of cherry wood. Put simply, she is beautiful. This vessel sailed Lake Champlain in New England until 1990 under the name Homer W. Dixon, after the uncle of the original owner. McGinnis, who had been first mate on the Dixon, brought her in 1991 through the shipping canals, 40 locks and the Great Lakes to Traverse City on behalf of the Traverse Tall Ship company, which he now owns.

Since those days, Traverse City and its surrounding counties—Leelanau, Benzie and Grand Traverse—have blossomed from a post-lumber industry backwater, known mostly for hunting and fishing, into a vibrant tourism Port of Call. The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (part of the National Park Service) on the state’s west coast, pristine beaches, rolling dunes, lush forests, inland lakes, quaint villages and boutiques, gourmet food, European chocolates, numerous wineries, bike races and cultural events draw hundreds of thousands of seasonal visitors every year.

Michael Moore put an exclamation point on this with his annual Traverse City Film Festival. And Pure Michigan’s advertising campaign targeting out-of-staters (especially in the Chicago region) with enticing videos of Michigan’s pristine nature has helped guide the state through a painful economic recession and establish tourism—more than the automobile industry—as the state’s future growth engine.

Amanda Danielson, who would lead the wine tasting on this weekend’s cruise, owns the Italian restaurant Trattoria Stella, together with her husband Paul, on the former grounds of Traverse City’s old state mental hospital. The Danielsons are among many who have taken advantage of the region’s interest in gourmet and local foods.

Originally from the Detroit area, the couple opened Stella’s six years ago with the intention of promoting local farmers and sustaining the local economy. They knew that Michigan’s geographical location on the 45th parallel—the bountiful region halfway between the Equator and the North Pole—and its abundant farmland make it the second most agriculturally diverse state in the nation, following California. They also knew they wanted to emulate southern European cuisine, where the food on your plate is never far from the farm. And they knew that with a couple dozen wineries located on nearby Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas, they could pair tasty, locally harvested grapes with fresh food. (Danielson is studying to take the sommelier exam.)

Since opening in 2004, Stella’s has worked with nearly sixty local farms and producers, and the summer of 2009 was their best one yet, which Danielson owes as much to tourists as to the support of the local community. “There’s a population of people here who appreciate good food from the backyard,” she explains.

This is Danielson’s third wine-themed windjammer cruise aboard the Manitou. This fall the schooner has hosted three other similar weekend trips: an astronomy tour, a folk music trip, and a chocolate and storytelling cruise (courtesy of my mom’s business, Grocer’s Daughter Chocolate, and my dad’s storytelling troupe, the Beach Bards). Captain Dave McGinnis has considered a yoga and meditation-themed cruise as well.

Danielson’s first year on board she stuck to a 45th parallel theme, with wines from Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Bordeaux (France), Piedmont (Italy) and this region. In 2008 she highlighted indigenous grape varieties that grow well here, such as Riesling, Pinot Noir and Cabernet Franc, and compared them to grapes from Europe.

The theme this weekend would be peninsular wines—appropriate, as we sailed north between the Leelanau and Old Mission Peninsulas. Danielson had also included wines from other famous peninsulas around the world: the boot of southern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula including both Spain and Portugal, and Greece, which has developed more high-end table wines in recent years.

The weekend’s wines were paired with delicious dinners prepared on a wood stove by the Manitou’s chef, Wendy Foss. On Friday night, after we docked in Omena Bay, between the towns of Suttons Bay and Northport on the Leelanau Peninsula, Danielson began the celebration by opening a bottle of local winemaker L. Mawby’s “Sex” sparkling wine, proceeded to a white with hints of salt from Cinque Terre, Italy, wowed us with a sweet Rosé from Toscana and, finally, seduced us below deck with a delicious red table wine, where we enjoyed fresh, southern Italian cuisine of pasta cooked with clams, fresh vegetables and portabella mushrooms. The dinner was simple, yet fresh and tasty. Homemade tiramisu awaited us when we resurfaced above deck and watched the sun set over land just beginning to show the slightest hints of fall colors.

That night a crisp fall air made the Milky Way galaxy above seem all the more clear.

The wind died on Saturday, and Captain Dave needed the motor to get us around the tip of Leelanau County and over to North Manitou, in Sleeping Bear Bay, he taught us Polish drinking songs.

Without enough wind to fill the sales, Captain Dave found time to reminisce about his love for sailing as he manned the wheel. While studying photography at age 19 at an art school in New York City, the New Jersey native spent six days as a passenger on a tall ship cruise off the coast of Maine. He was instantly smitten and emptied his meager college savings to return. In 1985 McGinnis got a deckhand job on the same vessel, sailed the coast of Maine for several years and occasionally spent winters in the islands near Florida. Five years later he met the ship now called the Manitou and brought her to the freshwater seas.

“I feel very fortunate to be her caretaker,” McGinnis says. “It’s about stewardship. This boat, if she’s cared for, will certainly outlast all of us. There are boats still sailing the coast of Maine that were built in the 1870s.”

By 1995, Captain Dave and his wife Mary—who met on a boat called the Angelique—felt burned out by the shipping life and decided to take a break and return to Maine. McGinnis went to work as an assistant manager at a 30-room bed and breakfast on Penobscot Bay. But by July of that year, he recalls, watching all the schooners he had known for years sailing up and down the bay while he was chained to a desk in the lobby showed him that the shipping life was still his calling.

Perhaps he heard the words of English poet John Masefield in his mind: “I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.”

A year and a half later Dave and Mary returned to Traverse City and the Manitou, and he’s been behind the wheel ever since.

Somehow, despite the lack of winds today, by mealtime, Danielson and Foss managed to transport us from Italy across the Mediterranean Sea to the Iberian Peninsula. And on the second day we ate delicious roasted chickens with potatoes and green beans, washed down with a Portuguese Vinho Tinto, which followed a Rosé from Old Mission Peninsula and a sampling of whites from both Spain and Portugal.

That evening, the Manitou’s life raft made several trips ferrying people to North Manitou Island, an uninhabited part of the National Park, for evening strolls along the beach. According to Ojibwe legend, North Manitou and her sister island to the south were formed when two bear cubs, trailing behind their mother swimming across Lake Michigan to escape a forest fire in Wisconsin, grew tired and drowned. The great god Mishe Mokwa took pity on the cubs and turned them into the Manitou Islands. Meanwhile, sand covered the mother bear as she lay in mourning on the shore of the mainland, and her body became the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes.

After combing the beach for Petoskey Stones, and knowing that by mid-September Lake Michigan is warmer than the evening air, I opted to swim back to the Manitou, which rested peacefully 100 yards offshore. From a distance she appeared to be set in a painting from a bygone era, her white hull and majestic masts sharing the canvas with a vanilla sky and a shade of pink from the setting sun. Was I swimming toward a mirage? No, thankfully, she was real.

Sunday, another day without much wind, we returned to the mainland, and by evening found ourselves dining and drinking in Greece.

The Tall Ship Manitou sails four Windjammer weekend cruises in the fall. During summer she takes passengers on two-hour tours in West Grand Traverse Bay and also functions as a bed and breakfast. For information visit tallshipsailing.com or call 231.941.2000.