Day 7 Saturday June 29th - Catching up with boating friends

Day 7 Saturday June 29^th at Croker Island

Croker is the perfect anchorage as the winds continue to come from the Northeast.  We wake up to blue, blue, skies, and warm weather.  Summer has arrived.  As much as it is the weekend and we should have some playtime, we continue to be anxious to get the boat in order.  More organizing and more jobs to do.  The depth sounder needs rewiring (found a spare and got lots of advice under our belt), the dinghy needs a good cleaning, tours need to be done to show off our new home, and the reefing lines need to be finished.  Dawson spent all morning and into the afternoon changing out the stay sail tackle to the opposite side in order to run the 2^nd reefing line on the port side, and fixing the depth sounder.  The previous owner never used reefing lines, but both of us feel safer having these lines rigged in the case of high winds.  Eventually we head off for a dinghy ride with a group, but we peel off as we recognize some familiar boats in the next bay.  Azzura, which is a Mirage 33 the same boat as our previous boat is rafted up with a group of friends.  Over the years we have interacted with Dennis and Maryanne Centis owners of Azzuro and we are anxious to say hello.  A wonderful greeting as we pull in and find Jim and Tracey have just purchased a new Jeaneau out of Sarnia and are just 1 week ahead of us having sailed north.  Tony and Tracey Nutt are also rafted up so we share some stories and extend an invitation for them to come visit us the next day.  We are off in the dinghy again, but can’t resist stopping by Fracas, a Whitby 42 owned by Greg and Mary Lou Wright.  Greg has recently retired from Northeastern Manitoulin where he often interacted with Julie professionally on many funding projects.  Greg and Mary Lou are also planning an extended trip but are 1 or 2 years away as Mary Lou has not yet retired.

After a quick visit, we return to our own group of boats.  The day is quickly disappearing.  A swim, some dark and stormy, some laughs and it is dinnertime.  We do a “family” dinner at the Dickieson’s boat.  This consists of bringing your meat dish and sharing the veggies.  We made a lovely spinach salad to share with everyone.  The evening air was filled with giggles.  We were in hysterics as Patti, who does not drink too much very often had enough red wine to find everything funny.  We got laughing about a mythical stair retraction system she had installed so that when someone (Doug her husband) did anything wrong she would push a button and the stairs would retract tripping him up.  Then we had the button for the ejection chair.  You perhaps had to be there, but we sure laughed and laughed, every time anyone said anything out of line, they were either being tripped on the stairs, or being ejected from the chair.  We polished off the evening with a fire on the beach and a few rounds of Charades which of course started with Dawson doing “Jaws”.

Back to the boat for the night.  A damage free day.

Cheers Dawson and Julie.