Dead alewives littered the shoreline as I stood in the darkness on the Sheboygan, Wisconsin, coast on June 24. The humid air above Lake Michigan was still as the last high pressure system of the 1995 heat wave crept over the Midwest. I checked my fully-loaded sea kayak to be sure the sea anchor was in place on deck and the air sponsons were in one of my three cockpit knee tubes. Behind my seat lay a backup GPS. I launched a few minutes after midnight. The only light near me was the cone projecting from my headlamp and the flashing camera held by a reporter from The Sheboygan Press. I had slept just before preparing my kayak for launching, and I would not sleep again until I had completed the sixty-four-mile journey to Ludington, Michigan. I started the trip at this time so that I would be most alert and have the best weather conditions during the mandatory night portion of the trip.

After one hour of continuous paddling, I entered a waypoint in the GPS and found that I had traveled four and a half statute miles. I drank a can of juice and set off for another hour of paddling. At night, I traveled without lights except during a five-minute break after each hour of paddling. After each break, I lined my bow up with a star near the horizon that was aligned with my course.

I love night paddling when the stars are ablaze above and meteorites stream through the heavens. There was no tape player to distract me from the wind and the waves. Hour after hour merged together as I kept up the methodical process of paddling and break taking until the sun rose. Hours later, in the middle of the afternoon, I arrived at Lake Michigan's center. As my original GPS had malfunctioned two hours earlier due to the high humidity, I input the position into my backup GPS.
At 6 p.m., eighteen hours after starting, the bow of my kayak slid onto the sandy beach at Ludington, Michigan. I needed fifteen minutes to convince my knees that they still had full range of movement. After being interviewed by a local reporter, she informed me that I had made the Associated Press International for crossing Lake Michigan.
I returned to Wisconsin aboard the S.S. Badger, the last of the coal-powered ferries plying the Great Lakes. The ferry beat my crossing time by fourteen hours, but I looked out over the water thinking that I may have been able to cross back on my own.