Day 343: Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Port to Port: Golden Sword Island

Underway: 0:00 am      Motor Off: 0:00 pm      Miles Traveled: 0      Stayed At: Anchor

First Things First: First time using a steadying sail.

Mile 8 to Mile 8: What a difference a day makes. Yesterday was a perfect travel day. Today was a perfectly awful day. It was windy, cold and overcast. The wind never let up. We all decided to stay put given a forecast for winds of 20 knots with gusts to 30. Why move. Our anchors are holding. We are comfortable and reasonably well protected. We have lots of food. And we have friends nearby to talk to on the radio.

We haven’t had a real down day in a long time. When we stay an extra day at a marina, we always seem to fill the time with projects. We still worked on a few projects but mostly just relaxed and read or worked on fun projects. Cindy finally had time to figure out how to make some nautical woven coasters – it took a while to get the hang of it but she ended up making 6 of them – they look perfect. I read a whole book and had time to write two blog posts, do a little planning, backup some photos and make a steadying sail to help keep us from swinging so much in the wind. Kent helped instruct me how to rig it over the radio (it just so happens he has written articles about the topic before – lucky for us). I just modified and jury-rigged an old piece of sailcloth we had with and it worked amazingly well. Instead of swinging back and forth 120+ degrees, we are only swinging about 20-30 degrees. The boat is a lot more comfortable and stable.

We chatted and laughed a few times with our friends on Carina and Spiritus. It is comforting to know we have friends nearby.

I think we have been in Canada too long – some people (I won’t mention names) thought they saw snow today. Since the temps were probably in the 50’s, it was just mist blowing around but they still used the “s” word. It does remind us, though, that we need to keep moving to keep ahead of the seasons or we may see the real stuff soon enough.

Tomorrow doesn’t look much better than today but we’ll just see what the day brings and plan accordingly. Maybe just a short day to feel like we are making progress and experience another beautiful Georgian Bay anchorage.