Man Attempting To Sail Homemade Houseboat Through Great Lakes In Winter May Have Not Thought This Whole Thing Through

A Canadian man became a minor celebrity in the Great Lakes region when his homemade houseboat was spotted drifting (more like, adrift) under the Blue Water Bridge on the St. Claire River near Port Huron, Michigan, last week. Unfortunately, his grand plan of sailing through the Great Lakes in the middle of winter have been set aside. It looks like he won’t be making it to Chicago for Christmas. 

Steven Mylrea of Harrow, Ontario, Canada, headed out on his homemade houseboat, ominously dubbed the Neverland, with nothing more than a dog and a dream; to take his pre-fab home, kept afloat by giant plastic barrels and powered by a tiny outboard motor known as a kicker motor, all the way through the Great Lakes to Chicago. Such a trip would require covering hundreds of nautical miles in some of the most challenging sailing conditions one can find in fresh water in the middle of unpredictable winter weather. 

So it’s probably a good thing, then, that Mylrea pulled the plug on the shores of Lake Huron Tuesday morning. It sounds like a Huron County Sheriff Kelly Hanson and her officers finally talked Mylrea out of his epic quest, according to the Detroit Free Press:

“We took note that the boat was there” at Bird Creek Beach in Port Austin’s harbor, “and he was trying to make it ashore. He did get it into shallow enough water there to accomplish that.”

The sheriff then spoke with the Neverlanding’s builder, owner and captain, Steven Mylrea of Harrow, Ontario, Canada, “to see what his intentions were going to be.”

The sheriff said he even offered to have the department’s air boats break nearshore lake ice to get the houseboat afloat again on Lake Huron. Mylrea, however, “indicated he was pretty exhausted, and was second-guessing what he was trying to attempt.”

“I had a conversation with him,” Hanson said. “I questioned his judgment. (But) the fellow was a friendly individual.”

That part about the police department using air boats to break ice apart to get the house boat going again is a good indication that this plan was never going to work in the first place. Mylrea wanted to sail north across Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac and down through Lake Michigan to Chicago, hopefully by Christmas. He then planned to take the Neverland through U.S. river networks and out into the Atlantic Ocean. Buddy, that is nuts. Still, over 14,000 people were cheering Mylrea on from the comfort of a Facebook page. Luckily, reason won out over social media cachet.

To Mylrea’s credit, he did get the Neverlanding certified by Transport Canada. When the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Detroit made contact with Mylrea near Port Huron all his papers were in order, just maybe not his priorities. I’ve sailed on the Great Lakes with highly experienced sailing teams in sailboats meant to handle the extreme winds and waves and still nearly died on Lake St. Claire (not even an official Great Lake!) in the summer due to unexpected weather shifts. We completed a 24-hour long race in just 10 that year, and that was August. November is another monster entirely. 

Listen; we just had an anniversary about this. Gen Zers have finally stopped posting Edmund Fitzgerald memes. We do not need another Great Lakes-based tragedy to take the life of an in-his-prime dreamer to start it all up again. And just because Mylrea’s route didn’t take him through Lake Superior doesn’t mean he was doing something somehow safer. Lest we forget, the monster storm of November 1913, which is better described as a snow hurricane, tore through Lake Superior and Lake Michigan, killing approximately 250 people. Just last week, the National Weather Service alerted sailors on the lake of 9-12 foot waves and wind speeds reaching 30 knots. Add to the mix giant freighters and the hard-to-steer little Nerlanding’s days were numbered anyway. 

So good job landing the Neverlanding, Mylrea, you’ll live to sail another day this way.