Everybody wakes up happy, but how could you not in such a beautiful
place. In fact, we think this anchorage
rivals the nicest ones we visited in Thailand last year during our catamaran
charter. It is Canada at its best and
makes one feel proud to be Canadian.
The kids make peace with each other and I am sent down to scour the
depths and retrieve the One Ring. A
little background information is in order here.
I am known as the Village Diver as I have a particular knack for finding
personal property dropped into bodies of water.
Over the years some of the items I have retrieved from the bottoms of
lakes and oceans include eyeglasses, car keys, sunglasses, utensils, marine
barbeque parts and, most recently, my dad’s iPhone that he dropped into 15
degree water off the sailboat at our Sarnia marina. I’m not sure why I am good at this; all I
usually do is put on a mask, dive into the water, swim to the bottom, and I end
up right on top of the lost item. We all
have our own special little talents.
I jump in the water and start searching.
I almost immediately spot a crayfish crawling on the bottom so I dive
down, carefully grab him so that his pincers can’t get me, and bring him up to
show the rest of the gang. Now what
would have been really cool is if the crayfish had been wearing the Ring of Power
around his neck, but that was not the case.
I leave the crayfish crawling around on the dingy and continued my
search. It takes a while, but I
eventually spot the glistening ring on the lake bottom and feel a magnetic
pull, as if the ring wanted to be found.
I dive down, outstretch my trembling hand and retrieve the ring. I burst through the surface of the water,
hissing “My precioussssss...” but through the snorkel it really doesn’t sound
like much at all and the rest of them probably just thing I am choking on
muck. Anyway, the One Ring is snatched
from my grasp by Magnus, which is fine by me as he will end up being the one
looking like Gollum. Magnus puts on the
ring and disappears.... into the water to do some snorkelling. After five minutes he paddles over to me in a
frenzy saying, “Dad, the ring fell off!”
No problem for the village diver, I swim down right on top of it, grab
the wretched ring, then swim back up and hand it to his mother and say, “Keep
it secret. Keep it safe.”
After all that excitement we pull anchor and go for a nice slow cruise
around the whole island. At one point we
wiggle Bella Blue through an impossibly narrow channel bounded by rocks that we
had spotted yesterday and I vowed to conquer.
We pass carefully through another narrow channel that separates the
north from the south Benjamin islands and find a huge bay full of anchored
vessels, probably about 30 of them, from sailboats to big powerboats to
trawlers to tugs. There are also a few
paddleboarders and kayakers cruising around on the flat waters. We realize that all the “smart” boaters took
the north anchorage because of the southerly winds, but since the winds were so
slight we ended up practically alone in our special spot and avoided the
crowds. Sometimes inexperience pays off.
We complete our circumnavigation of south Benjamin and set a course for
Gore Bay. It is a straight, 20 mile shot
south-east so I lock in the heading on the autopilot and Ana and I relax in the
cockpit, each with a book and hot coffee and we agree that life couldn’t be
better.
Gore Bay is a small town on the northern side of Manitoulin Island and
though the name would give the impression it’s a bit violent and brutal, it’s
nothing of the sort. It is a lovely
little northern town and we happen to arrive on day 1 of Harbour Days – a three
day festival of drinking, eating, soapbox derbying, tall shipping, slowpitching,
theatre-ing, cardboard boat racing, glow partying, pancake breakfasting, beef
on a bunning, jet boarding, fish frying, kite flying, classic car showing, beer
gardening, rock and roll cover banding, jumpy castling, and a whole lot more. Actually, not a whole lot more, that’s pretty
much the whole list of activities I read off the brochure.
We walk down to the marina office to pay for our dockage and find the
home of CYC Canadian Yacht Charters and their nice big marine store which has
loads of boating supplies, fresh coffee, smoked fish and a seating area with a
magazine exchange. The dockage rates
from marina to marina seem pretty consistent at $1.75/foot which is not too
bad. The waterfront area in Gore Bay
stretches quite far and is centered around the public docks and CYC, but also
has gazebos, a marine centre with a museum and art galleries, a large kids
playground and plenty of green space.
The walk into the main downtown area is a mere two blocks and there we
find a classic Main Street with all that you would expect. Ana and Magnus zero in on a shop having a
massive sidewalk sale that spills out onto the street, while Stella and I explore
Main street, scoping out a place for lunch.
We meet up at a coffee house/sandwich shop and enjoy a round of
delicious toasted paninis. During lunch
we read through all the activities happening this weekend for Harbour Days and
decide to spend Saturday night as well.
The weather today is beautiful, clear and hot and while tomorrow looks
to have a few scattered showers, it will still be warm. Finding such cool little town is an integral
part of our sailing trips. Also, when
you are a boater you can have a completely different experience than visiting
by car, from your arrival by water, to the completely distinct culture that is
always found around the docks.
After lunch we return to the boat for a chill out session then at 6:30
we walk back into town for the first of the Harbour Days events – a glow dance
party for kids! But the organizers
haven’t forgotten about the adults, because the glow party is being held in the
basement of the Canadian Legion, so we send the kids downstairs with their two
dollar entry fees, give them a few bucks to spend at the canteen, and then we
pass through the doors of the Legion.
You can go into any Legion in Canada, from Victoria to Regina to Thunder
Bay to Halifax and find the same thing – an ancient shuffleboard, a pool table,
a non-fancy television, beer-stained carpet and a whole bunch of locals elbowed
up to the bar drinking cheap Canadian lager.
Everybody knows each other and you don’t remain a stranger for long
because people want to know your story.
I order up some drinks and also pay the bartender two bucks for the use
of the white cue ball. I rack ‘em up and
the game is on! Ana takes the first
game. I take the second. I am about to win the third game and actually
start my victory dance after the black ball drops, but then the white ball
drops too, turning my victory dance into the loser’s shuffle. Because it’s such a lame way to win we agree
on a final “winner take all” grudge match and I win that one. So I guess in the end it was basically a
tie. But at the Legion, everyone’s a
winner baby.
The kids have a ball at the dance party.
Magnus makes a friend named Cole and during their conversation Cole
mentions a friend of his named Zander.
Back in kindergarten Magnus had a friend named Zander, at least until he
lent Zander his favourite plastic griffin and Zander lost it. He left Magnus’s school shortly after that
but Magnus has never forgotten this brazen robbery and he is sure that this is
the same Zander and he has fled to Manitoulin Island to avoid prosecution. Magnus is hatching some sort of plan to
liberate the griffin, but then I convince him that there is no possible way
Zander has managed to hang onto that griffin all these years, and it was likely
sold off at his grandma’s garage sale years ago. While Magnus accepts the likelihood of this,
I also accept that this is the very same Zander – his eternal nemesis.
We were told that the restaurant Buoy’s on the waterfront is the only
game in town, so we walk over there and, as expected, have to wait a while to
get a table. They have large outdoor
patio that is chock-a-block so we opt for an inside table where the wait is
shorter and will be less buggy later.
The restaurant is in a minor state of chaos, which is probably its
regular state, with the few servers they have running all over the place, and
even helping out with cooking the food.
So we roll with the punches and sit down at an empty table and wait
patiently. They have a nice library of
books and games so Magnus and I play a game of chess while Stella does some
colouring and Ana browses through a few books.
It’s not until we finish our chess game that our server Kyle takes our
orders, and he even tells us a joke that involves rice, a bottle of glue and a
sailing ship, but we only get about half the punchline – the other half stumps
us. Turns out this is a strategy to keep
the customers occupied while it takes them 90 minutes to prepare pasta! But hey, we are vacation so who cares. We would discover later that Kyle doesn’t
actually work here, he was just filling in for his sister. In the interim we strike up a conversation
with a couple beside us, who are from Toronto and here on a 42’ trawler. I can tell from their faces that they have
some stories to tell. Just as we are
getting into it, Kyle appears and asks me, “Do you want shrimp in that pasta?”
“I don’t know,” I reply, “I guess.”
“Well you can have it with shrimp if you want. We have lots of them.”
"Tell you what Kyle. Because I
can’t even remember what I ordered I will leave it to your expert
judgement. Just make it good.”
Our next door table mates like my response so it seems they may want to
be friends. We’ve made some of the best
friends of our lives as a result of a table to table conversation in a
restaurant somewhere in the world. So
you never know.
Our food arrives, but it’s been so long since we ordered that we’re not
sure who gets what, or if the order is even right. We each grab a plate and dig in and it is
very good. I was too full of cheap
Legion lager to even have a drink with dinner so I wash down my fancy pasta
with plain old water, very unusual for me, but it seems to work. We continue our conversation with our friends,
learning their names are David and Jacque and they have a black Lab named
Parker. They offer to show us a couple of
good anchorages on the chart and invite us to stop by their boat tomorrow.
We pay the bill, walk back to the marina together and then part
ways. We return to our boat and discover
the festival beer garden tent is situated directly behind our dock and is jammed
with people. The live band is actually
pretty good and cranking out some decent cover tunes. I’m tempted to go over for a quick drink, but
once we’re inside the cozy Bella Blue we instead fire up a movie and watch it
to sleep.
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