On the spur of the moment, my wife, Silvia, and I decided to head up to East Tawas, MI on Lake Huron for an overnight excursion.  It was a nice change of pace, and it helped us beat the heat a little.

One of the things I most enjoy about East Tawas is being able to operate at Tawas Point State Park (US-1545). It’s a two-fer in that operating from there is not only a POTA activation, but also a lighthouse activation, as the park is home to the Ottawa Point/Tawas Point Light (ARLHS USA-837). And, as a little bit of a bonus, last weekend was National Lighthouse and Lightship Weekend.

It’s about a two and a half hour drive from Ann Arbor to the park, but it took us at least 30 minutes extra, due to construction near Flint. We got there about 1:30 pm, and enjoyed the lunch we had brought while we looked out over Lake Huron.

I then found a nice shady spot to set up the rig. Last time I was here two years ago, I set up in the sun, and my KX-3 got so hot, I thought I’d damaged it. This time, in the shade, the radio stayed nice and cool.

I was on the air for a little over two hours and made about 30 contacts. Most of my contacts were on 20-meter CW, but at the end, I ventured into the phone portion of the band and was able to make four park-to-park contacts. I figured—correctly, I think—that I’d have better success hunting than calling CQ on phone. One tactic that seemed to work very well is to add “park to park” to my call. That got the activators’ attention even though my 15 W was certainly not the strongest signal on the band.

A noisy activation at Tawas State Harbor

We stayed at the Tawas Bay Beach Resort that night. It’s a nice hotel, has its own little beach, and is close to downtown East Tawas. It’s also right next to Tawas State Harbor (US-6812).

Since we had to check out of the hotel by 11:00 am, I decided to get up a little early and make some contacts in the morning. That way, my wife could stay in bed and not have to sit out in the park while I operated. I left the room a little after 7:30 am, hiked over to the park, and was set up just before 8:00 am.

When I turned on the radio, though, I was quite dismayed to hear all the noise. It was peaking at S5! When I conjured up the plan to activate this park, I hadn’t realized that it was right next to an RV campground. My guess is that all that noise was coming from the campers. I tried re-orienting my doublet antenna, but that didn’t help at all.

Not only that, band conditions seemed quite poor yesterday morning. There were only a few strong signals. Couple that with having to operate with the noise reducer on means that I’m sure that I missed a few calls just because they were below the noise floor and I couldn’t hear them. If one of them was you, please accept my apologies.

I operated until about 8:30 am, when I decided to give up fighting the noise and band conditions. Overall, I managed to make 16 contacts in about 35 minutes, so actually not a bad rate.

I packed up and headed back to the room. When I got back, Silvia was ready for breakfast, and so was I. We had a nice breakfast at the hotel, then took a walk out to the end of the breakwater at Tawas State Harbor. It was a little bit warm out there in the sun, but quite enjoyable looking out over the lake. From the shore, you could just spot the lighthouse, which had to be at least a couple miles away.

After our walk, we packed up the car and headed home. There were no major traffic holdups on the way home, and we made it in two and a half hours.