BEAUSOLEIL ISLAND

Friday, July 10

Finished off the Trent-Severn Waterway this morning by going through Lock #45 at Port Severn. There have been a total of 76 locks since we left Florida on this trip! Now we can put away the fenderboards and the gloves and cruise all at the same water height while here in Lake Huron.

From Port Severn over to Hogg Bay was only an hour or so to get to James & Jackie Power’s house and tie up at their dock out front.

Docked at James & Jackie's place

They had just returned from their canal boat trip in France and it was great to see them again, see their house & meet the rest of the family living there. It is a beautiful setting and very comfortable house. We jumped in the car with Jackie to get a tour of the Midland area, pick up a few things for dinner and stop by the Bell store to, with Jackie’s assistance, get a wireless data plan. Even though our US-based phones offer text and data service over Canadian networks, it is interminably slow and frustrating. I had brought an old, unlocked iPhone along, so we got a new SIM chip and now have 2GB of data per month! I guess I’ll have to start taking more pictures, now that there is no excuse for not loading them on to the blog.

Dinner was also a lot of fun with John and Kathe Macdonald joining us from Toronto. Their Boat, PDQ FREEDOM, is berthed in Midland and they are taking off for a couple of weeks to cruise the North Channel. We went over charts of both Georgian Bay and the North Channel and got some interesting bits of information about the area.

Saturday, July 11

We debated about taking off today or staying another day to enjoy the hospitality of our hosts. We borrowed a car so that we could get buy a cruising guide of the area and do some provisioning. We finished what we needed to do by early afternoon, so we decided to go over to the marina to get fuel then head up to Beausoleil Island. Getting fuel is a bit different here compared to the US. The fuel dock was staffed by a full crew of young people in the marina uniform who provide full service. Apparently by law, only a fueling crew can be aboard the boat at the time of fueling, so we stepped off, stood in the shade and watched them work. They fueled up both forward and aft tanks, pumped out our holding tank and filled up our water tank before we could get back on the boat. In the US, we were handed the diesel nozzle at the fuel dock and it was up to us to get everything done. Having fueled up many times on our own, we had a routine down where I would fill the tanks and Elaine would watch the fuel gauges, relaying their information to me so that the tanks would not overflow and make a mess on the deck. We did eliminate any overflow by doing this, but we also ended up not filling the tanks all the way up, stopping when the gauges were reading about 7/8 full. Well, we now have FULL tanks. Considering we last filled up in Bremerton, New York on June 25th - 16 days ago - we did pretty well. I’ll have to calculate our distance travelled, but a rough estimate gives us 4-5 miles/gallon over that time. Not bad for moving your house along the water.

One of the reasons we had considered waiting another day to get started was that it’s Saturday, and the weather is nice. Everyone said there would be hundreds of boats on the water today and it would likely be very crowded in the anchorages.  Well, I can assure you that prediction was not accurate. There are not hundreds of boats out here - there are thousands of boats out here today. And a surprising number of them throwing inconsiderate wakes around through narrow channels and in the anchoring areas. We’ll have to put up with this for at least half of tomorrow before they all start heading back home and leave us in peace for another week. Hopefully by next weekend we will be out of range of the overnighters in their “go-fast” boats.

Our dinner view tonight

One of the advantages of our boat is the shallow draft - we can go places where many other boats would hit bottom. Using this to our advantage today, we found a quiet place to anchor in a few feet of water between two small islands in Chimney Bay. It’s a nice, protected area with good holding for the anchor and a dynamite view while eating dinner (again). I did take a swim after we got settled in. It’s still a bit chilly when you first get in, but OK, once you get moving around It’s so nice to be able to swim off the boat in fresh water!

Tonight's sunset