Kerr Bay (2013-07-31)

N 44° 10.057', W 076° 43.375'

 Just a quick post for tonight.  We had a long day's travel getting back to Kingston, and decided to settle into Kerr Bay on Amherst Island for the night.  This has been an anchorage we've wanted to try for a long time, and our first impressions of it are quite positive.

Sandy Cove (2013-07-30)

N 44° 08.522', W 077° 18.457'

Well, we're finally on the move again.  We had a great break, and a very good visit with Dar's father and sister during the week.  On the weekend, our kids and their SO's (significant others) came down to Dar's sister's place to spend a couple days with us.

VHF upgrade project (2013-07-25)

The downtime from travelling while visiting Dar's sister has given me some time to get some work done on a couple projects.

The first project that I worked on was the completion of my VHF radio upgrade.

Trent-Severn Lock 6 - Frankford (2013-07-23)

We had a pretty short day today, moving a whole whopping 4 miles up the Trent River to the upper wall of lock 6.  We had planned on anchoring in front of Dar's sister's house, which is a couple more miles further north on the Trent, but this was such a nice spot that we decided to stop here.

Trent-Severn Lock 2 - Sidney (2013-07-22)

N 44° 07.884', W 077° 35.470' W
 
After a great sleep in Hallowell Mills Cove, we raised the anchor at around 9 and began to make the run the rest of the way to Trenton.  Actually, it took a bit more work to get the anchor up this morning as it was really well set (I'm liking this new anchor), but up it came in the end.

Hallowell Mills Cove Anchorage (2013-07-21)

N 44° 01.992', W 077° 08.145'

The houses along Parrot's Bay were a buzz with activity yesterday, and many people were enjoying a nice summer Saturday evening.  A couple hours after sunset most of the parties finished up, with only a few loud people carrying on for a bit after that.  Once all the revellers had passed out, Parrot's Bay was actually quite peaceful.

Parrot's Bay Anchorage (2013-07-20)

N 44° 12.903', W 076° 41.247'

Today was a long day, but a good day.  We shared the first locking down with another Mainship, a Pilot 34 named MiAmi, out of Manotick.  We cleared the La Salle Causeway Bascule Lift Bridge at the 1300 opening, and headed west across the Kingston waterfront.

A Day Off at Upper Brewers (2013-07-19)

We had a nice day here today.  We puttered about on the boat and read and just generally relaxed.

Upper Brewers (2013-07-18)

Thursday night finds us peacefully tied up to the dock at Upper Brewers lock.  We actually pushed our luck a bit with the weather today.  The same forecast for today as it has been for days now called for hot temps and high humidex with afternoon thunderstorms.

Newboro (2013-07-17)

After a nice night at Poonamalie we had a leisurely morning and continued on our way at 0900.   The channel leaving Poonamalie was very narrow.  I wouldn't want to meet another large boat there.

Poonamalie (2013-07-16)

We decided to push on a little farther than Smiths Falls today, which is where we had planned to spend the night.  The next lock up river from Smiths Fall, Poonamalie, has power, which means we have A/C without running the generator.  Yay! :-)

Merrickville (2013-07-15)

The lines were cast off at 0900 and we were finally on our way.  After more than two years of planning and dreaming, we had to keep asking ourselves if this really was happening.

And, we're off!

It seems like so many people in cruising boats have this Mark Twain quote on their blogs.  This seems like a good time to put it on ours.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Chaos to Order

The last few days have been a blur of provisioning and running back and forth to the boat.  We made the last runs of stuff out to the boat on Saturday.  For the last run we had our son come out with us and then drive our car home.  It felt a little weird watching our car being driven away, and being left without any car at the marina.

Canada Day video

This is my first foray into video production with the new GoPro camera.  I ran it for a few hours on Canada Day, doing 30 second time lapse capture.  I think it turned out kind of neat.  I wanted an iconic Canada Day song to accompany it, and I think Stompin' Tom is about as much a Canadian icon as there is, and his "Canada Day, up Canada Way" song was just the ticket.

A new house bank

I had mentioned in a previous post our 'ailing house bank'.  While it was accepting and holding a charge just fine, its capacity was down substantially. The house bank on a cruising boat is very important, because when you're not hooked up to shore power it's the house bank that powers everything on the boat.

Our fifteen minutes?

On Tuesday morning, shortly after we had moved the boat from the west wall of the Ottawa lock canal over to the east wall, a man with a honking big and expensive looking camera came up to the boat and introduced himself as Bruce Deachman from the Ottawa Citizen newspaper.  He explained that he was doing a series of articles about life in Ottawa during the summer and asked if he could do one about us.  We invited him on board and had a nice chat for about an hour.

Well, it seems that the Citizen has found our story worthy of ink and has published his article about us.  I haven't picked up a paper copy of the newspaper yet, so I'm not sure what page we ended up on, but I did spot the spike in traffic to the blog and followed it back to the online page for the article;

Days of Summer, Day 15: A slow boat to paradise

So there you go, our fifteen minutes of fame, and thankfully, it wasn't in the crime section! :-)

A short pause

Another trip to Ottawa for Canada Day is now in the books.  We're home now for a few days with some boat and house projects to take care of before we head out sometime next week.

A down-day in Ottawa (2013-07-02)

As we did last year, we chose to spend another day in Ottawa on the wall and not deal with the crowd of boats rushing for the locks.

We waited for some of the boats to leave, then we moved over to the east wall where we could tie up to a dock instead of a railing.  We also hooked up to shore power so we could give our ailing house batteries a boost.

We had a nice quiet 'down day'.  We did some sight seeing, a bit of shopping and went out for lunch.  Tomorrow we'll begin the trip back up the river to our marina, but we'll probably make a two day trip out of it, just because we can. :-)

Canada Day in Ottawa (2013-07-01)

Another Canada Day, and another year of patriotic red and white.  Words can't even do justice to the number of people that were downtown this year, so I'll let this picture do the talking;

A panorama of chaos... :-)