Month: July 2018

This post was going to start with a bunch of interesting stuff about the people who tortured us yesterday, but the kinder and gentler one of us was reluctant to call a spade a spade.  So we’ll leave it at one grainy photo.

The highlight of the day, of course, was the Peterborough Lift Lock.  Did we mention that this is The World’s Highest Lift Lock?  Some folks who just completed the Loop were on top of the lock and sent a picture of us on the way up.

The first time.

Big fun the lift lock, although perhaps Misty Pearl’s crew didn’t exactly share the same level of enthusiasm for doing it three times.  But since this is The World’s Highest Lift Lock, we really had no choice, right?  In any event, up and down and up we went.

The thunder rolled while were were in Lock 24.  No reason for us to travel between locks when they’re closed in both directions, so we hunkered down on the wall with Second Wave to hope the lightening was over and we weren’t stuck there all night.

After the storm passed, we made our way with to the wall at Lakefield.

No shore power, but a solid meal at the Canoe & Paddle.

Our waitress reminded us of Grace Appelbe.  Unfortunately we had very limited cell service, so no blog post.

Today we got up and out to catch the first passage through lock 27.  Most of the morning we felt squeezed like we were in some sort of giant squeezy thing, but the scenery was fantastic.

As we passed through Clear Lake, we shared a moment of silence for Buddy Holly and Richie Valens and the day the music died.  Of course we weren’t in Iowa—or heaven with Shoeless Joe Jackson—but still.

We planned to stop at Buckhorn, but there were houseboats crashing around all over the place and no room on the wall.  Three  companies rent houseboats out of Buckhorn Lake.  The lock guys hate them and try to “flush” them through the locks as fast as possible.  A bit of panic set in until Dana landed us two spots at Gordon’s in Bobcaygeon, a town on the north end of Pidgeon Lake.  The women who run the joint assured us there was deep water.

We currently sit in barely enough water to float a canoe, but we’re very happy to be here to enjoy what turned out to be a cool marina and town.

We woke up this morning to the sun shining through the hatch above our bed and birds chirping out our windows.

At waaaaay too early an hour.  And it was cold.

The idea was to get to the first lock by 9, when it opened.  However, between here and there was a very shallow and long canal, a very shallow and long lake, and two bridges that someone needed to open for us.  If we know we’ll be delayed at one of those we’d just sleep in and enjoy the delay whilst tied up.  Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

In addition to a lake, a canal, and bridges, we had to deal with weeds.  The weeds here grow to the surface. We plowed ten miles of weeds, easy, while working through slots where fortunately beauty trumped the treacherousness.

As we approached Lake Simcoe, however, the land started looking like Iowa.

Or maybe like that place where Ren McCormack played tractor-chicken with Willard before they became friends and proved that dancing is in the Bible and thus wholesome after all.

The other issue was boats in our locks.

Five boats in a lock—including us and Second Wave—is three boats too many.  Once that happens, however, you’re stuck with them through the rest of the locks until someone peels off.  Although the small boats were filled with good-natured teachers “on holiday,” our good fortune at having them stop for fuel was highlighted when they later passed us on Lake Simcoe, with the dude on the bow of the lead boat completely naked.  At the end of the day we reached Orillia.  More on Orillia later since we’ll be here until at least Sunday.

As for yesterday, the idea was to do a time-lapse of the entire cruising day.  Not the pump-out part, or the moving across the small river to the blue line part, but the actual cruising part.  Then we’d post the video for the blog entry.  We got the video done just fine, but were stuck on a wall with no cell service.  No cell service means no blog post.  So here was yesterday:

Orillia was our 11th stop since we reached Canada.  A few observations about Ontario:

• Every town—no matter how small—at a minimum must have a couple of pubs.  No real restaurants with proper food, mind you, but at least two pubs with the same menu as all the other pubs in the country.  Pubs are to Canadians what Misty Pearl is to biting flies.
• For a land that’s frozen 90% of the time and whose mascot should be Olaf the Snowman, there’s very little ice to be found.  Order ice water, and if lucky you may get two small cubes.  We asked for ice at a breakfast place in Bobcaygeon and the waitress literally sneered at us for asking a stupid question.  She stated—in a tone that made clear what should be obvious to any imbecile—that they had no room for an ice-maker.  We gave away an ice-maker that fit in a boat, however, so we found the whole experience sketchy.  Maybe Canadians just get tired of cold stuff, but warm orange juice isn’t yummy.
• They also don’t brew iced tea up here.  In fact, ask if the tea is freshly brewed and they look at you like you just asked for an ice cube or something other than pub food.  Dana possibly would trade Benny for an AJ’s tea right now.
• Don’t count on cell or internet service.  When the Russians deploy the electro-magnetic impulse bomb that destroys all electronic forms of communication, Canada won’t miss a beat.  Pinpoint bombing the LCBOs would be a much more effective way to bring Canada down.
• The people are super nice.  We can’t emphasize this enough.
• They care about the planet, as evidenced by the lack of litter and the aggressive recycling programs.
• The scenery is epic.

Ok, on to Orillia, a decent-sized town just north of Lake Simcoe.  Home of Gordon Lightfoot.  If we tried hard enough we might be able to work in a line from The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald after all.  We didn’t pass a Carefree Highway, but there’s a Gordon Lightfoot Avenue.

It may not be as busy as The Tragically Hip Way, but the music is way better.

Speaking of music, we hit Orillia during Scottish Festival.  Which meant a pipe and drum parade.  We would bet that Howard Jones isn’t big in Scotland.  Here’s a wee bit o’ the good stuff.

It also seems that many of these towns have some sort of art theme.  We’ve seen fish, flowers, and assorted other things.  Orillia’s thing is sailboats, perhaps because Lake Simcoe is a favored sailing spot.  In our little area alone there probably were a dozen of them scattered about, many of them claimed by the boys—several times—as their own.

Another day spent cleaning the boat.  Where the hell do the spiders come from?  Spiders, spider webs, and spider poop everywhere.  Misty Pearl looked good for a short while, at least in dim lighting.

The marina doubles as a seaplane taxi-way, so we got to watch planes land and take off several times.  Way cool.

The marina also was jammed with Loopers, which was both good and bad.  The good is that we caught up with some old acquaintances and met some new folks.  The bad is that a bunch o’ boats leaving on the same day in the same direction will just clog up the system.  Some of them left in the rainstorm today, but we stayed put.  One of us worked on important stuff.  One of us binge watched Ken Burns’ Vietnam docu-series.  We’re keeping our plans for tomorrow on the down-low with the hope that everyone other than Second Wave does something different.

The boys finally took us out on the kayaks.  (And yes, Benny is sleeping on the pink pillow.  Please don’t judge us or him.)

Two months ago today we waved goodbye to Big Daddy and pulled out of Washington.  Today we pulled out of Orillia—1,140.8 nautical miles later—just as the sun broke through the scary clouds that weren’t quite scary enough to make us stay another day.  Good call, because things cleared up nicely.

In places, the Severn River looked a lot like places along the Trent River.  Narrow, shallow, trees, etc.  It looks serene, right?

Mostly it is, but then you hit a lock.  Locks turn out to be collection points for all the people we like in concept but not in practice: other big boats, go-fast boats, jet-skiers. If the lock-master decides to be ornery, everyone gets jammed together in most unsafe ways.  The good folks at Lock 42 decided to see if Misty Pearl’s fenders would mate with the fenders on a boat with a 14-foot beam.  

The French-Canadians on said boat proved to be poor lock-mates so we tied up with Second Wave at Lock 43 to escape them.  Lock 43 unfortunately was just as crowded.

The big thing about the day—apart from our anniversary celebration—was arriving at Big Chute.

This is where we’re finally forced to confess that you can’t actually boat—as in float in a vessel on water—around The Great Loop.  That’s sort of an irrelevant  truth, however, because you can in fact travel the whole thing by boat.  Parcs Canada makes everyone stay aboard as the boat sits on a rickety-looking railway cart.

Basically you pull in over the submerged cart, they sling you up, and then after some five minutes of terror that rivals the terrorizingest ride Walt Disney could contrive they plunk you back in water.

Misty Pearl is our only home now, so it’ll be even worse for us if things go bad

Tomorrow we’ll pass through what technically is Lock 44 but even more technically isn’t a lock at all.  Great drone opportunity, right?  Mostly it would be, but today we scouted things out.  Either the lock-master was eavesdropping or Doug was injudiciously loud.   Turns out it’s highly illegal to drone over the Big Chute Marine Railway.  The last thing we need is to be sentenced by a Canadian judge to hours of synth-pop.  We aren’t even charging the batteries, therefore, just to avoid the temptation.  Video from the flybridge is the best we might do.

We finally saw a moose.

Yesterday the weather forecast looked grim, so the plan was to meet with Second Wave at 8 to see if anything had changed overnight.  The only thing that really changed was the fact that other boats left our marina and headed to the blue line at 7.  Throw planning out the window if other folks might get a leg up seemed to be the new plan, so we hustled over and tied up with time to take showers, walk the dogs, and research the day’s navigation issues.  But finally it was our turn.

As noted yesterday, the lock at Big Chute is a pretty darn cool marine railway.  The actual traveling part was not too scary after all.  The scary part was when the lock guys struggled to figure out our keel shape and how to set the slings so as to avoid the stabilizers.  Ultimately we handed them an iPad photo of Misty Pearl’s butt in a travel lift and they hooked us up.  (Crossroads and Change of Pace, if you read this you might want to have something ready to show them if they have the same concerns with you.)  Photo cred to Beth on Inuksuk.

The last stretch of the Trent-Severn Waterway includes more tiny islands with more happy, smiley, wavy Canadian islanders.  Look closely to see a happy, smiley, wavy Canadian islander on her porch.  

We’ll miss them, as after the last lock we popped out into Georgian Bay and on to Queen’s Cove, where we’ll spend 2 nights.  Both Misty Pearl and Second Wave are having some minor things resolved before going north.

When we reached Tay, Ontario, this afternoon, we were a bit cranky about the 70° and rain showers that forced us to use umbrellas on our way to the only local restaurant (which not-at-all-unexpectedly was a pub.)  Then we looked at our phones.

Mwaa Haa Haa.