July 20 found me at Alpena, Michigan. I would be crossing eighty-six miles, so I launched at noon to avoid more than one period of darkness on the lake. After two hours of constant motorboat traffic, I finally made my way into deep water. During the third hour of the crossing, I spotted the first and only ship I would see on the lake. Recalling my near miss on Lake Erie, I abandoned my plan to head for the lake's center and continued directly for Tobermory, Ontario. This would be the second geographical center I would miss, but I felt fine about getting within a few miles of it. During most of the twenty-two-hour-and-forty-five-minute crossing, I dealt with the demons I'd picked up from the Lake Erie incident. The additional twenty-six miles of this crossing caused some new physical challenges. I had to stretch my legs out past my rudder foot controls every few hours to alleviate a pre-cramp twinge in my right thigh. The cramp never came but four hours away from the Ontario coast, I experienced my first and only crossing injury. When I saw Tobermory off in the distance, I felt as though I was not making any forward progress, even though the GPS showed exactly how far away the town was each hour.

So I proceeded to increase my pace and paddling force. This eventually lead to a searing pain in my left forearm. I found, to my dismay, that I could not pull my paddle shaft with my left arm at all. The only way I could reach town was to modify my paddle stroke: I paddled on my right side using my regular style, but on my left side I only held the paddle with my left hand, letting the right arm provide all the power. This modified stroke slowed me down, but only by twenty-five percent. I was able to compensate for the vastly different forces on each side of my kayak with my rudder. I don't think that I would have made the same progress with a skeg. I have always used a deployed rudder on the lake crossings so that I save energy by not having to make correcting strokes; keep my legs in motion to reduce the chance of cramping; and hold a much straighter course to reduce my on-water time. I rarely use my rudder on trips or when training, but sixty- to one hundred-mile crossings are an entirely different matter.

Finally, I arrived in the peninsula town of Tobermory, Ontario. This would be the first crossing that did not spark any media interest.