It’s July 29, a Saturday – although it’s hard to remember what day it is when you’ve been on a boat for 44 days straight – and a beautiful morning as we’re off for the short trip from Hotham Island to Eagle Island, a favourite of many, but big enough to take all. We pull up the anchor – it has snagged and this is our first time having to coax the anchor out of the clay – but by 10:30 we are joining several boats there, and anchor in 18 feet of water in good firm holding. Shortly after, Tim and Rhonda also show up in Rhonda Jean and anchor nearby. (The key to boating in the North Channel in high season is to get to an anchorage you like the sound of around 11 am – that’s 11:00 hours to us mariners – when vessels who are moving on have already left, or are about to, and those on their way there have yet to appear.)
For some reason, the Americans we meet seem obsessed with our blueberries, and the fact that you can go ashore and just start picking them left, right and centre – which at this time of year, you can – is cause for some serious dinghy-borne expeditions. Accordingly, Tim and Rhonda, who have their favourite top secret place to pick these delights of the wild, right here on Eagle Island (shush), offer to motor over in their tender and pick up Michel for her to join them in the harvest. And, though it involves a great deal of scrambling over jagged, unsteady scree, and subsequently more than a few wobbles, amid the somewhat disturbing presence of bear poop and an occasional rattler snake skin, the whole thing turns out to be a successful venture.
Before we are guests of Tim and Rhonda at 5 o’clock for “docktails” on their 1977 DeFever – the only trawler older than ours to which we have been introduced so far – we engage in our usual swimming, kayaking, reading and dinghying (apparently called by experienced boaters “dinking”) activities.
Another day at Eagle Island – anchoring seems so much more worth while when you can linger to enjoy the place – brings more blueberry picking with Tim and Rhonda, and docktails at 5, this time aboard True North….and another beautiful sunset.
The next day we will be making our way to Little Current by way of a one night anchor stop at Sturgeon Cove, a mere hour away from the town dock, so that we can get to town the day after with plenty of time to do all our chores, which include an appointment to do some maintenance on the engines, which have now covered more than 100 hours this season.
So Monday we are up early, and it is a lovely calm morning for the 2 1/2 hour cruise to the delightful Sturgeon Cove – although the entrance is tricky, with a rock to the right of us, a rock to the rest of us, a rock in front of us –and there, on arrival, we encounter Bruce and Gabriella again, on their sailboat Spitfire, who are already at anchor and who greet us with a friendly (?) “there goes the neighbourhood” as we anchor in 14 feet of water. The water is warm, the swimming is lovely, and the evening is peaceful, with a special dinner from both BBQ and the stovetop.
And again – apologies for the enormous number of similar shots in this blog, but it’s difficult to not include them – another fine sunset, with the air so still you can hear the laughter from other boats echo across many hundreds of feet of water as calm as a mill pond.
The next morning, Day 47, we wake to a beautiful, calm morning, and Michel can’t resist one more swim in the Cove.
We leave for Little Current, and are soon tied up at the town dock. For once the current was actually little, instead of being substantial as it most often is. The town is remarkably pleasant and busy, with boats being a big part of their livelihood, with marinas and docks and tour boats and a boardwalk along the waterfront, and all the supplies and services you need.
We do all our food & drink shopping, do the laundry, wash the boat, fill up with drinking water, and in the afternoon two mechanics from Boyle Marine arrive to change the oil and filters – 10 litres of Shell Rotella T per Perkins diesel engine (from Peterborough, England) – and replace the impellers with new ones, even though the current ones have plenty of life left in them. Better safe than stuck. Later on, we had excellent plates of North Channel Whitefish at The Anchor Inn.
All stocked up for what we hoped would be nine days anchoring on our way from Little Current east , we were ready to go first thing in the morning. The hitch was that a front was coming in, and we had to look sharp if we weren’t going to be extending our stay in Manitoulin Island. We aimed for the 8am hourly opening of the swing bridge (the only land route in to Manitoulin Island) and made it ok, but with weather on our tail.
Our goal is to make it to Collins Inlet the other side of Killarney, thirty miles and less than an hour of open Georgian Bay water away, where we also hope to meet up with our friends Harold and Debbie in their sailboat Columba, who we know from our own marina back in Bath. They are doing a similar trip to ours, but a couple of weeks behind us. So we hightail it from Little Current, boosting the revs to 1400 or 1500 rpm to make a heady 9 knots or so, compared with the more usual 7 1/2 or 8 knots. We also have to stop in Killarney for a pumpout of our holding tank, which we hope will not take long. Of course, it does, with boats waiting in line for the same thing, and so we have to hover in mid channel for our turn.
Leaving The North Channel behind us, we head into Georgian Bay in light rain, so the front is gaining on us. But we manage to make it to a safe anchorage at Kehole Island near the entrance to the inlet before it gets worse – and at exactly the same time as Harold and Debbie arrive from the opposite direction!
Harold and Debbie dinghy over to see us, and then the rain starts in earnest, as the wind picks up, too.
Then the wind dies down and we have tomorrow to look forward to as a good sailing day.
Weather is still an issue – as it always is – and we can foresee a bad day on Friday getting very very bad on Saturday. This is Thursday, so we have to plan on getting across two hours of open Georgian Bay after we exit the eastern end of Collins Inlet, pass the Bustard Islands, and find an anchorage in the small craft channel, where we can find protection from the veering winds, for tomorrow, hopefully somewhere near Wright’s Marina in Byng Inlet (where we stayed a night on the way up) so we can seek shelter there for Friday and Saturday. Whew. That’s a long sentence, but not as long as the journey it entailed (53 miles). First, we went through Collins Inlet, leaving at 8:30 or so, which took us til 10:45 when we would be in open water.
Entering Georgian Bay, it was very breezy, but okay, and we made our way across the Bay and past the Bustards to the protected channel by close to 2pm. We sought out an anchorage that had good reviews, but found that it didn’t deserve them – there was little protection from the wind, and not a lot of room, either. So we moved on to an alternative, and found delight in Sandy Bay, where we anchored in 13 feet of water on 100 feet of chain, knowing the wind would shift overnight. And we were the only boat there. Of course, it did occur to us that maybe that was because nobody else thought it a good place to anchor, but we got over that, and happily it proved a great place to do just that. We kayaked through a lovely marsh area, and our only companions were two beautiful Loons and a flock of geese.
Friday August 4th is Day 50, and we wake to grey skies, a building wind, and the promise of rain. Just as we thought. Off we go on the short journey to Wright’s Marina and shelter from the storm. It’s only 9.5 miles, but is marked by treacherous, very narrow squiggles through a minefield of rocks, made somewhat worse by the fact that, in an extremely dodgy bit, the autopilot decided to have a conniption, throwing us off and demanding immediate reverse and hands on the wheel, not the buttons, for the rest of the trip!
We made it as the wind and waves were building under ominous skies. We tied up and hunkered down for the two days, along with quite a few other transient voyagers. We were lucky there was room.
Sunday would bring light winds and some sun, at the start of a week of good weather, so we made our plans: Anchor at Stairs Island Sunday and Monday, then at Bear Head Tuesday and Wednesday, then on to Honey Harbour on Thursday, and finally three nights at Wye Heritage Marina in Midland, where we hoped to see our family members pay us a visit.
At this point, we had covered 777 miles since setting off, with the most northern and western stop being Longpoint Cove, when we had travelled 625 miles. We were now about 100 miles north of Midland. Let’s see if this all works out.