Taking a sea cruise around the Apostle Islands, WI

On our recent trip to Wisconsin, I tried to step out of my comfort zone a little bit and try to not plan out every moment of our time there. I'm definitely a planner by nature, so I wanted to try and be a little spontaneous because many times those moments lead to the absolute best adventures. Despite that, there was at least one thing I knew I needed to plan in advance for, and that was the cruise around the Apostle Islands that left out of Bayfield, WI.

The first night of our trip when we were staying in the upper peninsula of Michigan, I got online and looked to see what day during our time in Wisconsin would afford us the best weather. I then went ahead and booked our sea cruise for 10:30 AM on Thursday which was our first full day in Wisconsin.

We were a little nervous later Wednesday night when we saw that there was going to be a dense fog advisory for the entire area on Thursday until 10:00 AM. The hope was that by the time we were ready to leave on our cruise the fog would be dissipated enough not to obstruct our views.

We were very lucky, and by the time we made our way to the dock, the fog was mostly out of the area. We arrived at the dock area a good 45 minutes before the boat was supposed to depart, only to find out that a few other people had an earlier start on us. We took our place in line and waited for the lady to give us her talk and then it was our turn to load on the boat.

I took some shots around the harbor as we were waiting for the cruise to depart. Oddly enough, I didn't take any photos of the boat we rode on!

There is a local ferry that travels back and forth to Madeline Island, and we got to see that load up and take off a few times while we were waiting. Before we knew it, it was time to take our place on the boat. We sat on the top deck so we could get some of the better views of the islands. It was quite chilly though as once you get out into the far reaches of Lake Superior the temperature can drop a good twenty degrees from what it was on the docks.

The cruise took about 2.5 hours, and I am going to be honest, a lot of the islands look the same. The boat only travels around 25 miles per hour, so a lot of your time is spent just traveling across the open water from one island to another. There are 21 islands that make up the national lakeshore of the Apostle Islands, Madeline Island which I mentioned earlier is not generally included along with the other ones.

Over the decades, the islands have been home to miners, and lumbermen who harvested the sandstone and timber respectively from their shores. These days they are protected and stuff like that doesn't happen as much if at all. In fact, they have become home to a large number of bald eagles as you can see in the last photo above.

The parks service does a pretty good job of preserving the history of the islands and you can see in the photo above they have an old fishing camp that you can visit and learn about. There is actually someone who works for the park service that live out on this island through the summer to maintain the historic camp. You can't see it in the photos, but tucked behind the trees is the cabin where they live and a nice solar array that provides them power.

In the far reaches of the Apostle Islands group, are some of the famous ice caves that people usually associate with the islands. Chances are if you have ever seen an article online talking about The Apostle Islands, you have seen photos of the caves either during the summer like this or during the winter where you can walk into them on top of the ice.

The lighthouses out on the islands are all automated now, and mostly unnecessary due to GPS, but you can still visit them if you have your own boat or kayak to make your way out to the islands. I forgot to mention, nobody really knows why they are called the Apostle Islands, that's just the name that they were given. They most likely have other names which were given them by the Native Americans that still inhabit the area, but if they told us that on the cruise I missed it. It was a long trip and there was a lot of information!

Several of the islands do have camping areas where you can travel out to them and tent camp, we even saw a truck and trailer being loaded on the ferry for Madeline Island as we were coming back into the harbor.

One of the things that really stuck with us was just how brilliant the water looked. It was an amazing trip and not a bad value for the $100 or so we spent on it. I'd highly recommend it. There are other options available for tours which you can see on the site here. If you are ever in the area, I highly recommend checking it out. We did The Grand Tour, though one of the hiking shuttles could have been pretty cool. @mrsbozz and I have been doing a bit more hiking lately.

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