The Manitou Passage — a stop on M-22 North.
The water between you and those islands has a name — the Manitou Passage — and it is one of the most consequential few miles of water in the Great Lakes.
Here's why. A vessel running north or south on Lake Michigan could either go around the outside of the Manitou Islands, out in open water, or cut through the passage between the islands and the mainland and save real time. And South Manitou has the only natural deep-water harbor of refuge for many miles — so in a rising gale, everybody ran for it.
The trouble is that the passage is narrow, it has shoals in it, the currents are awkward, and it fogs. So you had the busiest shortcut on the lake, crowded with ships, in the worst possible weather, in the dark. The result is a seafloor littered with wrecks — this whole area is now protected as an underwater preserve, and divers work schooners and steamers here that sit upright and largely intact in the cold fresh water.
Some of them are in water shallow enough to see from a kayak, or from the air. In low water years, the ribs of wooden ships appear right in the surf line on the island beaches.
So when you look out at that pretty channel with the islands beyond it: that's a shortcut that a great many people took and didn't come out the other side of.