A Thousand Islands and One RCMP Stop

Brockville to Holmes Manor, Bateau Chanel  - 38 nautical miles sailed, 2 kilometres walked

We left the anchorage at a leisurely 7 am to a glorious, clear morning. The thin layer of bugs all over the boat slowly blew off as we gained speed heading upstream. The current was getting progressively weaker the closer we got to Lake Ontario, but I knew there would be some narrow channels in the Thousand Islands with heavier currents.

As we motored I mapped out the route we'd take through the island chain, sticking to the ultra safe, but slightly longer one. Last time we were here we took the shorter, more scenic route and rammed full speed into an immovable rock, causing damage to our keel bolts and requiring significant and expensive repairs. Since SeaLight had a beautiful bottom and new bolts and fibreglass, I didn't want a repeat performance.

The scenery throughout the Thousand Islands is serene and mezmerizing. Cottages dot the waterfronts of the islands and narrow channels wind through these. The geographical area of the Thousand Islands is small, making it a great place to explore and anchor out...if one had ample time, which we did not, so we kept the motor running and simply enjoyed the scenery.

As Magnus was at the helm and I was sitting in the cockpit, a US Coast Guard boat approached us with their blue lights flashing. I told Magnus to put it in neutral to let them attach to us. I knew for damn sure we hadn't broken any speed limits and we'd dropped off all the guns and drugs and immigrants and high power weed killer back in Montreal, so I wasn't sure why they would be stopping us.

I was surprised to see two RCMP officers appear and tell us they were boarding the boat to do a safety check. They explained that they were trained in US procedures which is why the US and Canadian patrol boats were used interchangeably in this area with a winding border and the ability for boaters to cross back and forth without having to report in. We invited them on board and asked what they wanted to see.

"I need to see your boat registration, boater license cards, and lifejackets," one of the officers said, but in a very kind way.

"No problem," I replied and quickly gathered the requested items. "Anything else? I can also show you the flares, axe, signaling device - we have all the mandatory safety stuff on board."

"No need, I can see you are well set up here. Where are you coming from?"

"Bahamas. Spent the winter there, but had to come back up the Champlain due to the Erie Canal delays."

"Really?" he asked, looking around the boat. "Usually when we stop cruisers returning from winter trips their boat decks are a mess, full of diesel cans and water jugs, and all sorts of junk."

"I don't get it either. You can get diesel anywhere. We just carry 10 gallons of it and 5 gallons of gas and the jugs fit in the anchor hold. I hate having a messy deck. Maybe those boaters do longer offshore runs than we did or dip further into the Caribbean."

"Well, your boat looks great. Welcome back to Canada and have a safe remainder of your journey," he said then both of them stepped back onto their boat and took off.

In all the years we have been boating in Lake Erie, Lake Huron, and Lake Ontario that is the first time we've ever been boarded by officials.

We continued on our way, passing by Gananoque and into the Bateau Channel and were soon in front of the waterfront home and dock of our friends Andrew and Victoria. The wind had really built up and was blowing at over 20 knots, making the docking a little tricky, but on the second attempt we landed it and lashed all the fenders we had (plus a couple we filched from the dock) on the side to prevent her from getting mashed up on the dock.

SeaLight has docked here many times over the years so it felt like home. After securing the boat we walked up to the house to see Victoria and their golden retriever Emma. Andrew, sadly, was away on a work trip in Fort Myers but I'd promised him we would use copious volumes of the dock water and electricity, eat as much food as we could pack in, steal the wifi, do all of our laundry, dump our garbage, destroy his fancy toilet, drink his rum and beer, entertain his beautiful lady, siphon the gas out of his truck, and maybe steal a few tools from the shed. Good friends are hard to find.

After seeing Victoria and having a quick visit (she works from home and seemed to be in the middle of some boring conference call) we returned to the boat and gave her a sorely needed cleaning. Transiting locks completely filthifies a boat. Normally, I'm obsessive about keeping SeaLight clean, but this trip, and the scarcity of fresh water for cleaning, has dulled my compulsions and the dirt and stains and skids haven't bothered me as much. But today, we cleaned. We didn't quite get up her to normal standards, but she was looking pretty good by the time we were done.

Victoria called us up for happy hour at 5 and we had a couple drinks on their gorgeous deck while we chatted and enjoyed the scenery. It had been over a year since we'd seen her so we had plenty to catch up on. Happy hour led to dinner and she had crafted two magnificent loaves of sourdough bread and a lasagna so we ate well and continued our visiting into the darkness. It was a real drag that Andrew couldn't be here, but we made sure to antagonize him with texts to make sure he knew we were having fun and hadn't forgotten about him.

We hauled our finished laundry back to the boat sometime after ten under the glow of a fiery red strawberry moon and discovered the previously clean SeaLight was covered with a blanket of little purposeless lake bugs.

She might need another rinse tomorrow.

July 19, 2023 – A Thousand Islands

“Wake up, need your help with a freighter.”

There’s nothing that wakes you up faster than the word “freighter” on an overnight sailing run. I throw my clothes on and climb up into the cockpit. Ahead of us some distance are three giant lights, a high white, a lower white, and a green and these belong to a large ship. The problem is, the light configuration I’m seeing does not make any sense. If the ship were coming directly towards us, we should be seeing red and green lights. If he were going away from us, we should be seeing just white lights. But the combination of green and white tell us nothing about what this ship is or where it’s going, but we do know it is huge. We try altering course first to starboard, then after a while we swing back to port, but it seems like the ship is just sitting there. We slow right down and wait. All of a sudden the ship takes off towards shore, thankfully away from us, and his lights still don’t make sense so I don’t know what the hell it was. But Ana did the right thing by slowing down and gathering the crew for a second opinion.

For the first time in the trip, we had been able to get the cloth out and do some sailing. Actually, motor sailing as the wind was coming from 30 degrees so not giving us much power with just the jib sail so we ran the engine too, which sort of defeats the purpose of nice quiet lake sailing, but when you have to get somewhere that’s just what you do. It lasted for about two hours then the wind shifted northward in our face and we were back to motoring.

Around 2am or so the girls went to bed and Mom joined me in the cockpit. When she came out she was shocked to see me hanging off the back of the boat in the dinghy with a lifejacket on. I had decided to get in there to ensure the motor was securely attached as the wind was strong, the waves were choppy, and the towed dinghy was getting pretty beaten up. She thought there was a major emergency operation underway, but I soon jumped back in the cockpit and everything was as normal as I could be.

Mom and I chat about so many different things as we sit in the cockpit experiencing Lake Ontario at night, the first time for her, and the most recent of many for me, but always mesmerizing. The new moon renders the water black and invisible. The strong winds pummel the boat and she creaks and whines as she rolls back and forth chaotically, threatening danger, but we are safe. Time drags on stubbornly when you think about it but moves rapidly when your mind is elsewhere. I am glad Mom gets to experience this. As dawn approaches I am having a tough time keeping my eyes open so Mom offers to stand watch solo while I cat nap. I doze for about an hour and when I awake Mom has been busy taking photos of the sunrise as we glide off Lake Ontario and into the St. Lawrence seaway and its  Thousand Islands.

Mom heads down for a nap and Ana wakes up shortly after that and joins me in the cockpit. We are now in northern shield land with a landscape of pine trees, rocks, shale, and islands everywhere. By 9am we are tied up at the public dock in Clayton, New York and it is a beautiful summer morning. I immediately crash and sleep for two hours while the ladies get up, get showered, and get ready for the day.

Clayton is excellent as always. The girls go wild exploring the many shops and I even pick up a couple of purchases at the hardware store – a multi-coloured ski rope to rebuild the towing harness for my dinghy, and a pack of Wrigley’s gum, a stick of which I offer to Stella and am rewarded with a suspicious look then, “Dad, I know it’s a trap.”

See what happens when I try to do something nice? I have no idea how she even knows about those old school finger snapping gum traps. Probably saw it on TikTok.

There’s a lovely line of about 20 multi-coloured Adirondack chairs on the Clayton waterfront so we each take a seat and enjoy the scene around us – power boats zipping back and forth, runners on the waterfront path, tourists walking by with bags, local kids jumping into the water off the breakwall. Clayton has by far the nicest waterfront of all the towns in the Thousand Islands.

We decide to stop for lunch at the Hops Spot and I start with a delicious craft beer, then the food comes shortly after that. As we are eating my mom mentions this popular radio jockey from my youth in Saskatoon, whose name is Brent Loucks. He’s the guy you hear on the Princess Margaret Home Lottery radio commercials in Ontario. My mom works for a home lottery organization in Saskatoon and runs into him frequently.

“Mom, I gotta tell you something about Brent Loucks.”

“OK, what is it?” she asks, curious.

“Do you remember the Face Song?”

“The Face Song? Nope. What is it?”

“Well, when I was a kid he used to play this song on the radio for a joke. And that goddamn song’s been stuck in my head since then. That’s 40 years. Quite the earworm. You want to hear it?”

“Sure!”

I begin my awful singing.

“Scrub your hands (scrub your hands), wash your face (wash your face), comb your hair (comb your hair), before you get up each morning, every day! Do doo da do doot doot da doo.

Your hands are sure to shake hands with someone who’s hands are sure to be clean. Your hair is where your face begins and your face is the very first place to be seen.

Scrub your hands (scrub your hands), wash your face (wash your face), comb your hair (comb your hair), before you get up each morning, every day!”

Ana looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Stella is clearly embarrassed. Mom is flabbergasted.

“That song’s been stuck in your head for 40 years??” Mom asks incredulously.

“Uh huh.”

“How often do you think about it?”

“A few times a week. Oh, there’s another one rattling around up there in my brain too, a jingle about the Saskatoon Transit System. Take a bus, take a bus. Yes, I’ll take the bus! Take an STS, it will get you there. Doot doo doo doo doo, doo, doot, doo, doo, doo doo.”

“I think there might be something wrong with you,” Mom says. Both Ana and Stella nod in agreement.

“No shit.”

Ana gets word that Daryl and Lydia are on their way in so we head back to the boat and give them a hand with their dock lines. We have a visit and hear of their morning run from Little Sodus Bay, which was excellent. They take off for a walk through Clayton while Ana and Stella chill on the boat for a while and Mom and I take the dinghy for a ride to a nearby island for a swim, a cigar, and a beer – glorious! Once back, Stella and I jump in the dinghy and go for a high speed ride down the waterfront and beneath some low bridges. She is a speed demon.

We all meet up back in Sealight’s cockpit for evening pretzels and dip that Lydia brings over. As we are chatting Daryl notices the new towing line I had purchased.

“Where’d you get that Jamaican line?”

“In town today. Needed a better towing harness,” I say, then add, “Why Jamaica line?”

“It’s got the colours of the Jamaican flag. We have one exactly like it, bought it years ago,” Daryl says, then stops for a moment, points at me and says, “You copied me!”

I guess he’s been reading my blogs.

Gananoque and Leek Island

We awoke to overcast skies, rain, and blueberry pancakes. I really enjoyed one out of the three.

Despite the showers, Stella and I went for one last snorkelling expedition as she wanted to see the catfish. Despite finding the catfish den, and despite diving down multiple times and even wiggling my fin inside the hole, he did not appear. I was tempted to shove my entire arm in there and noodle him out like a Loooooo-siana hillbilly, but the thought of a thirty pound and heavily whiskered bottom feeder clamping down on my arm and dragging me around the bottom of the lake didn’t have much appeal. So instead we cruised around the weedbeds and saw many fish.

It was a short sail to the the lovely town of Gananoque, which has the heavist tourist footprint in the Thousand Islands. Of course all of our Quebeccer buddies had taken up the transient slips, but we lucked out by finding a single available spot in the free, short term public boat dock so we slipped SeaLight in with a shoehorn, tied her up, then went off to explore the Gan.

As is typical in such shore leave expeditions, the ladies went thrifting while Tony and I just wandered around with our hands in our pockets looking like a couple of lost tourists. We did stumble across an amazing opportunity to rack up some more karma points – an older couple (let’s call them Mr and Mrs Jellybean) had just driven their small sedan over a bridge and had picked up something along the way that had become wedged under their car. Despite wearing our best shore leave outfits, we both fell prone to the ground in the gravel and started prying, beating, kicking, probing, smashing, coaxing, tugging, and wrenching the object from various directions using various limbs, but to no avail. We did discover that the object was a door from a mini-fridge, though why it had been abandoned on a bridge, or what had happened the fridge body remained a mystery. A quick look at Mr. Jellybean confimed he too had no idea where they had picked up this unwanted guest.

Tony came up with a brilliant idea. I would lay down in front of the car and they would drive the front tires up on top of me in order to gain some clearance. From there I would reach out with my last breath and strike the fridge door clear of the vehicle. I considered this option, and the gargantuan quantity of karma points I could achieve, then decided it was not yet my time to leave this earth so asked my good buddy if he had any other ideas. He pondered it for a moment, then calculated we could achive nearly the same effect (if not the heroic drama) if Mr. Jellybean drove the car up on the curb. Mr. Jellybean did just that and Tony easily removed the fridge door, and tucked it under his arm. The Jellybeans bid us adieu and thanked us for our efforts, but it’s all in a day’s work for Karma Kings such as ourselves.

Tony asked if we could keep the fridge door as a memento of the experience and I said, “Sure, if you’re willling to store it in your cabin.” So we said goodbye to the fridge door as he flung it into a nearby bush, where it would serve as a nice home for a local chipmunk or mouse family.

After all that excitement we decided it was time for a drink so we wandered over to the main street and found several promising options, but settled on a Thai restaurant, sat down at a table on the outside patio beneath an umbrella, and ordered up two rum and cokes. Our server returned almost immediatley with two of the most magnificently presented rum and cokes I have ever seen. We were each presented with a fine serving tray, and on it carefully placed was an extra large shot glass of dark rum, an ornate glass full of cubed ice, a sparking tumbler, a juicy wedge of lemon, a chilled can of Coke in a bright red can, and an unmistakable aura of love and attention enrobing the entire presentation. We felt like kings and were sure glad we ordered this instead of a couple of bottles of boring domestic beer.

We each carefully assembled the various ingredients into our tumblers, then raised them for a satisfying clink and a toast to our good fortunes, and had our first sip. Heavenly!

The ladies arrived shortly after this and we ordered up a delicious Thai lunch, which was not quite as magically curated as the rum and cokes, but very good nonetheless. Ana hadn’t found much in the stores, but is always happy for a little retail therapy in whatever form. Although we do enjoy the time we spend on the water sailing and anchoring out, we seem to always have the most fun and adventures when we visit towns and marinas, so this is an integral part of “the boat trip”.

There was a final bit of shopping after lunch then we all assembled back at SeaLight, cast off the lines, bid farewell to Gananoque, and headed back out into the lake. There are dozens of islands close to Gan so we reviewed the charts, had a look at the wind forecast, and then settled on the well-sheltered south-eastern bay of Thwartway, otherwise known as Leek Island. Because there were already six other boats here, the only available spot was to nestle into a small cove near the entrance, which didn’t have enough swinging room so we would have to employ the stern tree line tie-up method. I retrieved a 250 foot line from the anchor locker and handed it to Tony and Angela who loaded it and themselves into the dingy. Ana then dropped the anchor as I slowly reversed the boat into position and the Henriques navigated the dingy into shore, feeding out the huge line which was cleated on the stern of the boat, tended to by Stella. As we set the anchor, they snugged up the line and tied it to a giant pine tree, and voila, we were done! This method keeps the boat firmly in one position no matter how the winds and currents are behaving.

With that, we sat down in the cockpit to enjoy the view of this beautiful bay, the US shoreline to the south, and the impressive number of minks that were playing on shore and in the water. In fact, I’d never seen so many minks in my life - they kept popping out of the bush, appearing on the rocks out of nowhere, or we’d just spot a small wake in the water, followed up by a plop as the mink would dive underwater to scrounge up a snack.

I took the paddleboard out for a nice long paddle around the bay and down the channel westward. The water was clear, calm, and by this time the skies had cleared and the sun had returned. It was shaping up to be a beautiful evening. After I returned, Tony took the board out for a long ride while I did some snorkeling with Stella and the ladies kept themselves busy on the boat chatting and putting together a lovely snack board. We all gathered up on deck for happy hour and snacks under the fading but still warm sun and enjoyed what I’d consider to be the second best moment of 2021!

Kingston to Lindsay Island

You know what’s nice? Waking up and having a nice freshly brewed coffee. You know what’s really nice? Drinking that coffee on a beautiful deck of a beautiful house overlooking the beautiful St. Lawrence River. We had a lovely long chat with Andrew and Vic, catching up on recent events and bitching a fair bit about how a year and a half of Covid and four years of the orange clown to the south has turned so many people into utter idiots. Once we got that out of our sytem we got back to the poo jokes and things felt normal and happy again.

Sadly, our hosts had to head into work so the three of dingy’d back to SeaLight and had a nice big breakfast, than sailed her back across the bay and anchored in front of Andrew’s place. The wind was much lighter now so it was safe to anchor. I went for a swim and hooked on the mask and snorkel to go and chase perch around for a while while the ladies lounged in the cockpit. I couldn’t help but to swim over to dock area to get a close up view of the bottom, and it was no wonder we hit a rock as there were dozens of them scattered across the ground, but I couldn’t find any with a blue bottom paint stain so we must not have whacked it hard enough.

Shortly after noon, our friends Angela and Tony arrived, yay! We don’t go anywhere without them, which presented a bit of a logistial challenge this year as they too had sold their boat at the end of last season but had decided to try land yachting this year (hint…think RV). Fortunately they agreed to sign on as crew for SeaLight so we’d all be traveling in the same vessel this time around.

We hooked them up with arrival bevvies in the cockpit, them moved back to the upper dock lounge when Andrew and Vic returned from work. There, we drank beer and smoked cigars and all was good with the world. But soon, it was time to go.

We set the sails on SeaLight and began our slow ride eastward down the Bateau Channel. The ride was smooth, slow, and relaxing as we passed such a diverse array of housing along the way – many multi-million dollar mansions, small family cottages, camp sites, and even waterfront trailer parks. Something for everybody.

The Admiralty Islands is the name given to the first island group in the Thousand Islands chain, which really starts at Gananoque and reaches as far east as Brockville. We threaded our way through the channels and many boats that were already anchored in the area and found a suitable spot just west of Lindsay Islands. By “suitable” I mean the only spot we could squeak into that didn’t already have a bot – there must have been 30 to 40 boats in the anchorage, which is one of the downsides of visiting a beautiful and accessible cruising ground in the height of the summer season.

The five of us gathered in the cockpit for happy hour then enjoyed dinner and conversation into the evening. As the sun dropped and day was replaced by night, a menagerie of twinkling lights appeared from the tops of masts, from cockpits, from cell phones, and from the odd camera flash of cruisers trying to capture that special memory. But despite the potential for a massive boat party, it was very quiet in the anchorage. Our first night together in the Thousand Islands.