Day 135: In/Out to Wrights in Britt on Byng

7/25/18:  Yes, there was some fog, but not bad.  Last night, everybody (the other looper boats) said they were leaving at 8:00.  We got up, looked around, and they were all gone by 7:30.  I saw Compass Rose pulling out as I was making my coffee.  No problem – we had reservations at Wright’s Marina in Britt, on Byng Inlet, so there wasn’t a big rush to get there first.  However, the wind was going to come up in the afternoon, and our journey would have us in some big water, so the sooner we got on our way, the better.  It was going to be a 60 mile day.  Adios Parry Sound!  We left Nellie Mae, our little 25’ tug friend, behind.  She’s been having engine issues, and Tim & Mary made the tough choice to stop/postpone their loop here.  The engine just quits without warning, and they’ve had mutilple mechanics in multiple locations work on her, and she’s still doing it.  The next couple hundred miles are very remote with a lot of rocks in narrow channels.  They decided it is not a safe thing to continue here, because it always takes a few minutes for everything to reset and restart.  They are afraid that one of these times she won’t restart.  So they are going to rent a car, drive home to South Dakota, and bring their truck and trailer back, and take Nellie Mae home over the road.  They are very sad, but we all agreed with them that it is the right decision at this point on the loop, to be safe.  After all, who wants to be so stressed worrying about crashing all the time?  The loop is supposed to be fun.  They hope to come back to Parry Sound to finish their loop next year.

There was fog, but it wasn’t too thick as we made our way back out and down the sound.

This was our route for today.  Starting from the bottom right, we traveled west through Parry Sound, then north through the Small Boat Channel on the inside.  There was a point where we had to go outside into the big water, which we did at Pointe au Baril.  We cruised the big water for awhile, then turned toward shore and followed the Small Boat Channel – although it was still out in the big water, just in shallower water with rocks and markers.  Then we turned east and went up Byng (Bing) Inlet to Britt, to stay at Wright’s Marina.

It was a gloomy morning, but the water was calm and we saw some pretty interesting stuff!  There are lots of homes built on solid rock.  We learned that many/most homes do not have septic systems, but just holding tanks that need to be pumped out.  This place is solid rock, and the trees have very shallow roots.  Most places are accessible only by boat.

  

We wondered what happened to the rest of the gas station when we saw this old SHELL sign.

We found one really enormous tree!  It was like Jack in the Beanstock size.  Upon further investigation with my trusty binocs, we confirmed that it is indeed a cell tower in disguise.

We couldn’t see what was written on these stones, in the shape of a cross, but it was nicely done in a very remote little spot.

The guys really liked this homeowner’s priorities.  A nice little cove with a good boathouse.

The landscape at these houses looked like a really expensive architecturally designed stone-scape.  How beautiful it would have been if the sun had been shining!

We made it to Pointe au Baril, and now we would be heading out into the big water.  There was a neat old lighthouse here on the point.  And see the little speck on the left?  That is “the barrel”.

The sign said “Site of the original barrel denoting safe passage through turbulent waters”.  Don’t ask me – I don’t know. Are they suggesting we ride in a barrel through bad storms?

And now we were out in the big water.  The sky finally cleared up, but the wind kicked up, too.  We could see that there were at least 6 boats out ahead of us.  We laughed earlier in the day when we heard Fred on Compass Rose call on the radio to one of the other looper boats.  “Hey, this is Compass Rose.  We’ve been following you for awhile, but it just occurred to us that you might not be going where we intend to go.  Where are you headed today?”  HA!  The whole parade was going to Wright’s Marina.  It made us all laugh.  Island Girl was the last boat in the parade, and we were quite a ways behind the rest.  They were all traveling at about the same trawler speed as us – about 9 mph.

The water got choppier and rougher as we moved along.  We thought it might be better in the small boat channel, but it wasn’t.  We had waves hitting us in the side, so we were a bit rocky rolly.  We finally got to the mouth of the Byng Inlet. It was about 5 miles up, and when we got near the marina, we had to wait for all the boats in front of us to get docked on their finger piers which were numbered.  We got our slip assignment, but we didn’t know what it meant, and we couldn’t find a dock map on their website or anything.   The wind was blowing up the inlet, so they had us pull up to the fuel dock.  We weren’t sure what they had in mind, because our slip assignment was just “the main wharf”. Hmm.  Well, they pulled us around from the fuel dock, and tucked us in parallel to shore.  Oh!  So THAT is the main wharf.  OK.  It worked out fine, and the dock hands were great.

The setting here was beautiful.  The marina is 3rd generation family owned, and they are all really nice folks.

They did not have a restaurant or grocery store on site, but they offered a courtesy car that we could use to go a ‘goodly mile’ up the inlet to another marina.  So a whole gang of us did just that.  Joe from Band Wagon did the taxi driving back and forth for us all.  We had a nice time!

Meanwhile, our sweet Rocky has been having a sore ear and throat.  They asked about and found that there was a clinic nearby, so they called and got right in.  They took the marina’s courtesy car and they were back in no time.  The nurse diagnosed an ear infection and gave her a prescription to be filled.  But the nearest pharmacy was a half hour drive.  So they came back to the marina with the loaner van, and the owners gave them their own car to go to Noelville to get the medicine!  Such nice people!  On top of that, the clinic couldn’t take their U.S. insurance card, (this is Canada, eh?), didn’t have a way to charge them, so told them that they could just make a donation.  Really?  Wow!

They were late getting to dinner, but finally made it.   We were all talking about the weather and where to go next.  With the forest fires nearby, some of the popular anchorages are closed. This map shows the closed area in the red outlines.  The only route available is to go straight across to Killarney, and skip all the beautiful spots in the north.  There is a chance that some of it could possibly open up in a few days, but that’s a long shot.  The weather for the next few days is for windy cool weather.

This was Wednesday and we’d like to be in Little Current by Sunday, so we decided to go ahead and cross early tomorrow morning.  Most of the other loopers decided to stay put at Wright’s for a few days.  Compass Rose thought they’d cross tomorrow too.  We planned to leave the dock before 7:00.  It is about 60 miles to Killarney, through Collins Inlet, which is the route we wanted to take, and hopefully spend some time at anchor up there.