July 14 – Lake Swim, The Beaches, and the Worst Job in Sailboating

I started the day with some journal writing then a long paddleboard ride and swim in the channel. By the time I returned, Ana was ready to go so we tossed off the lines and motored to our next destination on the trip – Ashbridges Bay Yacht Club, which is just east of Toronto in an area called The Beaches. Ana checked the beach report and the recent rain had caused high levels of E. Coli so swimming was not recommended. Fortunately, with a boat you can stop in the middle of the lake and have yourself a nice swim out where the E. Coli are scarce, which is exactly what we did. It was gloriously refreshing with a water temperature of 27 degrees, which is the warmest we have ever seen this lake.

Our arrival was a little strange. Usually when a boat is coming in to dock, everybody in the vicinity leaps up and comes to catch lines and help them in. Docking can be exceptionally difficult and is where most accidents and injuries occur. We were assigned a slip that wasn’t quite big enough for our boat, so it was a little tricky and none of the people sitting in the cockpits of their sailboats nearby bothered to get up and give us a hand. Only after we got safely tied up and were walking up the dock to the clubhouse to check in did we figure out why – this club looked to be almost exclusively sailboats. Why does that matter? Well, in our experience sailboaters tend to be a little cool and prickly, especially when gathered in groups discussing such important matters as self-tailing winch speeds, anchor types, tell tales, sail shape, and the relative advantages of circular versus straight cotter pins for securing turnbuckles. This is why we tend to hang out with powerboaters. They are helpful, more fun, less weird, and it brings great joy to your heart when you accompany them to the fuel dock and watch them put in a thousand bucks worth of fuel to your sixty.

There was a huge event going on at the club with hundreds of young sailors there for a wind up event after two days of racing. We checked the weather and a menacing layer of thunderstorms were rolling in, so after spending a while in the cockpit of the boat being hammered by rain, we ran back into the clubhouse to watch the second half of the Euro Cup final between England and Spain. Neither of us care much for either of these teams so we just enjoyed watching some fine soccer in the company of uncharacteristically rowdy sailboaters with painted faces.

The skies cleared and we took a long walk down the boulevard of Woodbine beach with its 96 beach volleyball courts and thousands of people from hundreds of countries speaking dozens of languages. We walked up to Queen Street, admiring the lovely residential houses (you can get a small one for just under three million if you deal hard) then picked up a few groceries and had a slow walk back along the beach, stopping a couple of times to sit on a bench and soak up the scenes.

Because we hadn’t done any boat jobs for the day, Ana heroically found one for us – cleaning the composting toilet. This is a disgusting job, especially this time when the solids bucket had been somehow infiltrated with pee, creating a slimy stew of feces, coconut coir, bacteria, and god knows what else. I normally do this job on my own, at night, when nobody can see what I’m up to, but we made royal ass guests of ourselves and did it right on the dock of the lovely yacht club. It was late Sunday however, so nearly everybody had left their boats, so we didn’t cause too much of a spectacle with the garbage bags, rubber gloves, high pressure spraying, detergents, and intermittent swearing.

With a freshly cleaned toilet and new coconut coir loaded, we cleaned our fingernails then enjoyed delicious chicken burritos that Ana whipped together and may have been the most delicious I have ever eaten.