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.


We arrived at Jones Falls at about noon to find a group of boats just starting to lock up, so this gave us about an hour to wait.  We decided to have lunch and go look at the boats locking.  At about 1315 we joined four other boats in a group to lock down.  This got us through Jones Falls by 1410.  We knew Upper Brewers was only another hour or so away, and the skies didn't look *that* bad, so we decided to press on.

About half an hour in and the skies started to get a bit dark and ominous, and we started to wonder what Mother Nature would have in store for us before we got to Upper Brewers.

Hmm, those look a little nasty

We had a few sprinklings of rain just after we passed Seeley's Bay, but we had hopes of getting in to Upper Brewers before that sky opened up.  We partially closed up the flybridge and got ready to move operations down to the lower helm if needed.  Then we get to the Brass Point swing bridge.

We had been hearing about problems with that bridge for the last couple days, but we had heard it had been fixed.  Wouldn't you know it, but we get there and they couldn't get it open.  It took about 15 minutes for them to get the bridge to even start moving, all the while with light liquid sunshine sprinkling from the sky, with promises of more to come.  Finally we cleared the bridge and continued on.

We managed to make it to Upper Brewers at 1545, and had been in light to less light rain for about 15 minutes.  We got the boat tied up, got it all buttoned up just in time for the rain to stop.  *sigh*  Mother Nature has my kind of sense of humour... :-)

However, she wasn't done for the night, and we've had two good downpours so far.

At least the heavy stuff waited until after we got in

We had a few interesting sights today.  First off was this weird flag that a boat with Colorado as their port of call was flying from their VHF antenna.

I don't think I've ever seen anything like this before

I've never seen a flag like this before, but it kind of rubbed me the wrong way.

 This beautiful boat was tied up at the Hotel Kenney dock at the bottom of Jones Falls.  I knew right away that it was a Kadey Krogen, and after doing some googling narrowed it down to probably being a Krogen 42 widebody.

Kadey Krogen 42 named Outport, out of Toronto

When I first started researching cruising boats I quickly came across the Kadey Krogen brand and very much liked how these boats were designed and built.  Unfortunately, they are well out of our budget range.  Still a great boat though.

I heard a pretty funny line today.  A cigarette boat (google for what they look like - they are essentially a hull built around engines and a fuel tank that go stinking fast from fuel dock to fuel dock) came in to tie up at the dock so a guy from one of the other boats already here and myself went over to give him a hand with lines.  As he was circling the dock I mentioned to the other boater that the cigarette boat probably burnt more fuel just circling the dock than I did all day.  The other boater replied that he had heard they use special liquid cooled fuel gauges on those cigarette boats.  The liquid cooling is to keep the bearings on the needle from burning out. :-)

We had planned on continuing down to and through Kingston tomorrow, on our way to Trenton.  We decided to change that plan when we read the marine forecast for eastern Lake Ontario for Friday and found high winds from the southwest and waves of 1 to 1.5 metres.  While we weren't going to be going out on Lake Ontario, the problem is the gap between Amherst and Wolfe Islands.  Anything on the lake coming from the southwest gets channelled up into that gap.  We found that out on our first season with the boat when a gale on the lake prevented us from getting the boat from Collins Bay to Portsmouth for several days.

It looks like the winds will shift to the northwest on Saturday, so we're going to take a down day here at Upper Brewers tomorrow and take it easy while letting the winds on Lake Ontario blow themselves out.