Day 6, Friday June 28th - a day of Lessons

Day 6 Friday June 28^th Picnic Island to Croker

We woke up to rain.  Yuk!  Guess we should not complain, as we are thankful for the rising water levels of the great lakes, and it takes some rain to accomplish that.

We have plans to head back to downtown Little Current to do some laundry and some blogging, and a few other errands. It is only a mile from Picnic Island to downtown.  We could dinghy, but might as well take the boat.  We are about to raise the anchor, but first to turn on the electronics so I can retrace my path that got us into the anchorage.  Ah oh! Electronics not working.  We rule out a few easy reasons, with no success then Dawson indicates he replaced a screw which was missing from the helm station.  What had happed was the screw had pierce a wire and shorted out the instruments, once we had that figured out we had to locate the fuse which had been blown.   What were the chances?  We spent 3 hours at anchor tracing back the wiring, locating a spare fuse and figuring out how to bypass the depth sounder (the instrument with the bad wire).  At last success and we were able to get the gps, and autohelm working again.  Dawson pulled the depth sounder and now had a new errand to do in Little Current.  This will be just one of the many glitches in our new lifestyle.   While we were hunting for fuses, I pulled my phone out of the cockpit pocket I had put the phone in for safe stowing while we are underway only to realize the pocket was full of water and my phone was now not working along with our new Bluetooth bad elf gps, which is a new electronic accessory to the ipad.  In total around $500 worth of electronics a hard lesson to learn.  They say things happen in 3’s so let’s hope this is the 3 and we are done.  I can’t get a hold of Colleen and Will to let them know we are delayed getting to Little Current to borrow their van for the 80 kms round trip to get propane so finally get the message relayed by the Dickiesons. 

It is now 1:00 and we make our way to Little Current with broken parts and spend 2 hours hunting around for parts to fix the depth sounder.  No luck, although we did get a few new fuses and Julie did manage to get some propane for our cookstove in M’chigeeng.  We are hoping to make it to Croker Island for the night which is a 3-4 hour sail away.  Luckily the days are long.

The winds are favourable and we sail up the Waubano Channel and head west to Croker.  After a lovely 4 hours sail we arrive at 7 p.m. and raft up next to Trevisiol’s new boat.  Their barbeque is nice and hot so we grab our pork chops and toss them on with the Trevisiol’s dinner.  What a lovely greeting.  Dinner is cooking before we are even tied up.  Beth welcome’s us to join them and by 8:00 we are dining with friends.  A few more boats pull in and raft up at the opposite end of the group of boats.  We are the only sailing vessel.  Everyone else is on power boats.  Mostly huge.  In all, by the end of the night we are 8 boats rafted together.  A party just waiting to happen.  Patrick’s are guests of the Louiseize’s boat Louie the 16^th, so a nice addition to the group.  Few drinks after dinner and off to bed.

Cheers
Julie and Dawson