Day 77, Saturday Sept. 7th

Day 77, Saturday Sept. 7th



Dawson with grass stains

Well we wake up early cause the wind is howling outside in the anchorage.  Alas we are so spoiled in the north channel with clean warm swimming water and lots of safe havens with good sailing in between.  We had hoped to explore long point today in the dinghy but the day is going to be gloomy and with being a mile from shore it is not inviting.  We decide we might as well get going.  It takes a while to get the anchor weighed as we have 150 feet of chain out and there are lots of weeds.  Dawson gets grass stains on his jeans.  Who ever heard of getting grass stains sailing???

Cloudy with stay sail up

Julie is a bit intimidated by the weather but it should be better than the day we went into Port Stanley and although they are forecasting gusts up to 23 knots, it is all behind us so it makes the apparent wind only about 17 knot gusts versus if we were sailing into it.  Once weighed it takes us another 30 minutes to get the sails rigged the way we want them as we decided to start with 2 reefs in the main.  Easier to shake the reef out than put them in during a storm.  Finally it is 8:00 and we are exiting the bay on our way to Port Colbourne.  We decide to put out our storm jib which is a stay sail we have only raised once.  We are sailing along nicely but decide we can handle a bit more sail.  Instead of shaking the main out we put out some Genoa, which means we are truly sailing cutter rigged (2 head sails).  Kind of neat and another first for us.  Every day we seem to have “another first”.  Firsts will probably be endless on this trip.  Julie is busy paying bills, and dealing with insurance making sure everything is in order before heading to the U.S.  It may take us a couple days to get new phone service, and our Canadian plan will be too expensive to operate in the U.S. so administration has to be all caught up.

Rain pouring down with a double reef in the main

After about 4 hours the sky to the north is getting really ugly and the waves are building.  We turn on the motor and pull in the jib.  Soon the ugly is directly overhead and the downpour begins.  Visibility is still about a mile except once in a while it reduces to about a quarter of a mile.  We are glad we have the AIS which tracks all the freighters and anyone else transponding.  Plus anyone receiving can see us as we are transponding.  By 3:00 we are closing in on the marina, but a freighter is also closing in so we decide to let the freighter go first.  We were 15 minutes ahead of the freighter, but we new we had to drop the sail etc. so did not want to risk being in the way.  Unfortunately to kill time, we had to head into the waves which by now were quite large.  A few waves splashed over the foredeck.  Dawson was concerned that our staysail which has been doused and lashed to the deck could be washed away.  That would be an expensive screw up.  The freighter then has to reduce speed and wait to take on a pilot so we realize we could have been an hour ahead of the freighter.  Big mistake waiting.  Our hour of killing time was no fun.  Eventually it is our turn and lo and behold there are now sea doos spashing along right in the channel in front, coming at us jumping the waves as we are surfing down them.  They had no idea our 21,000 pounds was difficult to control.  Finally we are behind the  breakwall and we dropped the reefed main and pull into Sugarloaf marina at 4:26.  (Marina staff leave at 4:30 so we had help landing).

We tie up and go through the landing routine which takes another hour then have our sundowner, and dinner and relax for the evening.  Part of the landing routine included getting the hay and straw that is coming out of the end of the boom cleaned up.  A bird had attempted at one point over the spring to build a nest in the boom and the mess is far up the boom and during storms and waves it is making its way out the end and into the cockpit.  Julie is concerned she will pull out a dead bird at some point because Glenn had plugged the end of the boom up during nest construction so the bird was either ot in the boom or maybe was when the plug went in to prevent further access.

Cheers

Julie and Dawson