2025 Boat Trip Day 9 - An Easy Ride Home

Port Credit Yacht Club to Newport Yacht Club - 21 nautical miles sailed, 3 kilometres walked

It was time to go home. Our daughter Stella and her friend Anna had arrived late to the boat last night for a visit and sleepover and I made us all a large breakfast of pancakes and sausages, topped with the berries we picked up yesterday. The mini-bananas I had purchased turned out to be complete duds. You know the awful taste you get in you mouth if you bite into a banana peel? Well, the bananas themselves somehow produced this ill effect and my mouth was ringing with banana peel toxins for an hour after testing one out.

By 11 am the girls had left, the day was scorching, and we were on our way home. There was enough wind to deploy the headsail, but we also kept the motor running to make decent time and we were back in our home slip by 2:30 pm. The marina was hellishly hot and I lost about ten litres of fluids carting our gear out to the van. We normally have a gate access very close to our boat, but due to the construction of a brand new club pool in the adjacent park, we have to use the main entrance at the clubhouse which is a half kilometre dock walk.

The rest of our Newporter posse arrived before us and uniformly looked tired, listless, and spent, like us - unmistakable signs of a successful weekend.

And thus ends the 2025 boating trip.

July 30 – Back Home to Newport

It’s 1:30 pm on Sunday. Ana and I are sitting on the bow of SeaLight as the sun shines down, the wind blows directly in our face, and the autopilot drives us home. It the first time we’ve done this during the trip and it gives us a chance to reflect on the amazing times we’ve had with our family and friends over the past 18 days and all the new places we’ve explored.

During this trip we covered 804 kilometres or 404 nautical miles which translates into approximately 72 hours of sailing. This averages out to just over four hours of sailing per day, but of course much of this came in larger passages which gave us time for down days where we didn’t sail at all.

This is now our fourth major sailing trip on Lake Ontario and I feel like we’ve achieved a pretty good feel for the lake. There’re a few spots left to explore on the US side of the lake, plus a number of marinas and yacht clubs in our neighbourhood in the western end that we’re yet to visit. Next time around we might decide on a slower pace and focus in on fewer stops with more time to fully explore each area. Saying that, I will admit we tend to get bored quickly. When we’ve had more time allocated on earlier sailing trips, like the longer 4 week trips we’ve done up to the North Channel, we’ve always just expanded the range of where we went instead of focusing in on smaller areas, but I guess that’s just what we like to do.

Along the way we defrost both the fridges (and pick more coffee grounds out of the top loader), clean and vacuum the boat, pull off the bedding, pack up our stuff, so by the time we arrive at Newport we are nearly ready to head home. Earlier in the day after breakfast, Magnus headed back downtown to hang out then took the train back to Aldershot, got the van, then meets us at the marina just as we are arriving. We take a few photos of us and Lydia, Daryl, and Chili then we were off, just as a big thunderstorm passes overhead and drenches everything. That’s been the story of the trip – sun to rain to wind back to sun back to rain. It’s all good.

And thus ends the 2023 sailing trip.