Ken and Karen’s travel adventures
8/6/18 Monday: It was nice and calm when we left the Kagawong marina. It was a cloudy day, which was surprising after being so hot yesterday! Although we did have that giant thunderstorm, Island Girl is still like a bug magnet! Bugs, bugs, everywhere bugs! And all the spider webs just add to the bug volume.
8/5/18 Sunday: Kagawong means “where mists rise from the falling waters” in the local Ojibwa language. We were going to go scope that out. SeaJamm pulled anchor around 8:00. That was a long process for them. Their windlass isn’t working, so Alan has to crank in the chain by hand, about 6 inches at a time. He’s going to have Popeye arms if he does that very often! We let them get a head start so we wouldn’t be in their way. Kenny took Stuart to shore, got the two 100’ shore lines untied, and I reeled them in. We put Stuart to bed in his cradle, then we pulled our anchor. It came up pretty clean, which was nice. And away we went! It was a little bit breezy and choppy today, but we only had about 15 miles to go to Kagawong. I had called yesterday to see about getting a slip reservation, but they said even though they were booked, we could stay on the outside of the wall. The wall is OK if there is no north wind, and it doesn’t have power. OK. Well, maybe we’ll just park on the wall for a few hours to go see the sights, then continue on to Gore Bay for tonight. Gore Bay is a big marina and they would have room. Read more
8/3/18: Bayliners UNITE!
Why is it that about every other day, the boat is just covered with these crazy bugs!? They don’t fly well, they are sluggish, and they are so fragile that they die if you look at them wrong. Kenny looked them up. They are mayflies. They all seem to be the same size, like an inch long or so. There doesn’t seem to be smaller baby ones. Maybe they all hatch at this size, mate, and die? I don’t know – but between these and a zillion dead gnats all over the boat, we have a pile of bugs to wash off! And I just did that yesterday!
8/2/18: There was a threat of thunderstorms today, so it sounded like nobody else was going to be leaving Little Current. It was only a 40% chance of scattered thunderstorms. We’ve seen this forecast so many times, and it has never materialized, so we decided to go ahead and move along. The Benjamin Islands are only about 20 miles from Little Current, so we didn’t need to hop out of bed very early to get going. And if you get to an anchoring spot too early, the people who were there the night before haven’t finished breakfast and moved on yet. So we had coffee, then walked up to the grocery store for a few items. We found stairs and a trail that took us right up to the store this time! That was way closer than walking up the road.
8/1/18: Did a song pop into your head? 😁 If so, you might be around my age. We woke up smelling smoke. Uh oh! Of course, being at anchor in the summer time, we sleep with the windows and hatch open for fresh air. This was a wood smoke we were smelling. At least it wasn’t the boat! When I got up and looked up the channel, there was definitely smoke on the water. Apparently the winds had shifted, and the smoke from the forest fires to the east of us was now blowing our direction. Dangit! It was pretty pungent, so we decided we would not stay here another night. Boo!
7/31/18: I just realized when I typed Day 141…. we have been on this crazy adventure for 20 weeks already! We are more than half way around the loop, timewise anyway, as our plan is for about 37 weeks total. Dude. That’s kinda wild!
Our plan for today was to backtrack to a couple of the most popular and beautiful places to drop an anchor for a stay. Like I said before, we had really hoped to go to these with Rick & Rocky, but time and weather didn’t permit. So today we were going to backtrack from Little Current to Baie Fine. It is a long fjord bay, with high white quartz hills on both sides. I read somewhere that it is one of the largest freshwater fjords in the world. It is nine miles long, the last two miles are very narrow, ending at what is called “The Pool”.
It looked like an excellent day to leave Little Current. There was a cruise ship on the town wall! Time to get outta Dodge! This ought to about double the population in this little town!
7/29/18 Sunday: We left Killarney about 8:30 in the morning, and headed west. Ahhh – the water was calm, the wind was calm, and it was a nice day! Because we need to have Rick and Rocky in Little Current by tomorrow, we skipped past a couple of highly recommended anchorage spots. We had really hoped to go there while they were with us, but the wind just did not cooperate with that plan. So, we’ll skip them for now, and head to Little Current, which is only about 24 miles from Killarney. Adios, you crazy channel! It was a very quiet morning in Killarney.
7/27/18 Friday: And the wind keeps blowing. What the heck?! We knew it would be, so we had already paid for two nights here – now we may need a 3rd. This was Friday, and we were surprised how many boats left from here today. Check out time is 11:00, and the docks were nearly empty. The dock hands said that there would be 40 boats coming in today, in the big wind… it would be a busy day! And yes it was!
7/26/18: We were up and ready to go and off the dock by 6:45. It was a beautiful calm morning, and the water was splat flat gorgeous!!
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. Read more
