Visitors for Our Final Weekend

For the final weekend of our boating holiday, we had our old friends Stillman and Ester and their two lovely girls for a visit. They were on their way back from Switzerland visiting Ester's family and stopped in Toronto for a few days before continuing on to Saskatchewan to meet up with Stillman's fam.

We were worried the two girls might get bored on the boat, but that did not happen - they found a hundred things to do to keep themselves occupied: swinging in the hammock, going for dinghy rides, exploring the hidden reaches of the boat, taking photographs, colouring, and even helping out a lot with the cooking and dishes.

I met Stillman in university and he's one of the very few people I've kept in touch with over the years, but we haven't seen each other for at least seven or eight years so it was a long overdue visit. They had recently moved back to Florida from Washington, D.C. and lived conveniently right on the Intercoastal Waterway so we expect to see them again very soon.

We spent one night on the boat in the marina then sailed over to Hamilton Harbour and spent the second night anchored out. We toured them around our favourite spots on Lower James Street (including Grandad's Doughnuts, of course) then had a great night just hanging out in the cockpit catching up.

After an amazing brunch back in Stoney Creek at the Innsville Restaurant, we parted ways. Stillman and the family left for their airport hotel and we drove back home to hang out with Stella for the rest of the day.

I usually do a big calculation at the end of these trips to tally how many miles we traveled, but this year I don't need to as we barely went anywhere! But that was our plan and I must say I had a most enjoyable vacation and felt like I'd been away from work for months. Which reminds me, we will soon actually be away from work for months, but that will be the subject of the next post....

July 21, 2024 - Blow Job on the Boat

I used to get sick a lot. In my twenties I traveled through and worked in a number of developing countries, regularly throwing caution to the wind. I did a trip on the Karakoram highway that runs through the mountainous frontier between Pakistan and China where landslide rocks regularly flew by our car as we passed through narrow and shaky roads just inches away from thousand meter drops. In that same country I visited the Peshawar region's illicit market (in disguise) where you could buy machine guns, rocket launchers, and kilogram bricks of hashish. In Central America, Ana and I traveled through some very sketchy places, getting robbed several times, once at knifepoint. As exciting as all this was, I also liked to try all the food in these countries, from street vendors, restaurants, peoples' homes, and markets. And frequently I'd eat something dodgy and get violently ill, blowing it out both ends, losing weight, and even getting myself hospitalized for the better part of a week with severe food poisoning. Now, don't feel sorry for me because this was completely self-induced and I could have easily played it safe. But where's the adventure in that? Anyway, my stomach developed into a nuclear reactor containment building and I was able to eat anything no matter how dodgy it looked or smelled.

Over the years my opportunities to eat suspicious foods has diminished, so now I am limited to eating yogurt long past its best-before date and milk that's just on the edge of turning into cottage cheese. Plus I've been known to assemble my lunch from perfectly good leftovers foolishly tossed into the kitchen garbage can by my less utilitarian family members.

Because of all this, I like to challenge my system sometimes, just to make sure I haven't turned completely into a wimp. So after returning to the boat on Thursday after a few days at home, I went for a paddleboard ride with my buddy Sharon then had a nice swim at the beach. What's the problem with that, you may ask. Well, after the torrential rain showers this week, the lake has been polluted with all sorts of nastiness from the runoff from creeks and overflowing storm sewers, creating a supposedly hazardous situation with the thriving E. Coli counts in the water, and all the beaches were closed and swimming was verboden. I did have a look in the water before diving in and didn't see any clumps of creatures looking up at me so I just enjoyed my swim and even gargled a bit of water to give my stomach a sample of challenging liquid.

Back at the boat I upped the ante. We've been having a little trouble with foul smells in one of the heads on the boat and I suspected a blocked air vent - this is the line that runs from the septic holding tank to the side of the boat where it is supposed to let the bad air out and fresh air in. I first shot water down the vent from the outside of the boat but it didn't seem to be going through so I leaned over, wrapped my mouth around the vent, and blew as hard as I could to see if I could force air into the tank. Well, I certainly built up a lot of pressure in that hose, but instead of the air going in, I got a lungfull and a half of putrid sewage vapour and particles. It tasted pretty bad and I could feel my stomach doing a few circles. I shot some more water in there, then did another huge mouth blow, with the same result. Just to be sure I hadn't poisoned myself (as I am slightly more cautious at this age) I went down into the cabin and grabbed a Scotch Mint. That ought to do the trick.

Next day, I woke up feeling delightful with no measurable after-effects, besides a bit of morning sewer breath, but that's normal for me.

July 15, 2024 – From Beautiful to Rainstorms then Back to Beautiful

For back to work Monday, we decided to sail home for a couple of days to get some things done, then we would return to the boat for the remainder of our vacation.

I wrote for a long while in the early morning to the sounds of the rowers training in the bay on a perfect summer day. These guys were incredible – there were six racing boats, one lean and muscled young man in each, and they sprinted back and forth, rowing fast and precise, causing hardly a noise as their boats sliced through the waters. Ana came out to join me, but by the then the rowers had finished, so she instead took some lovely photos of showoff birds sitting on our lifelines.

We left the club and began motoring across the lake with the wind directly in our face. I checked the weather and saw that a huge system of thunderstorms had developed and were speeding towards the lake so we decided to play it safe and pulled into the Etobicoke Yacht Club, west of Toronto. This is another top class, fancy yacht club, but it was very quiet. The rain soon came and the downpour was torrential, and we found out later that many city streets and buildings had been flooded, including Magnus’s college where the roof fell in on several classes and they closed the building until further notice. Strangely, there was little wind and not a lot of lightning, so we could have probably made it safely to Newport through it, but we were in no big rush and didn’t want to take any unnecessary chances. We worked on some boat jobs as the rain poured down, but it started to break around 3:30 so we put on our rain gear and went for a walk around the local area but there was very little of interest.

By 5pm the skies had turned blue and we continued along motoring towards Newport, now with zero wind and a completely flat lake. We had a lovely ride back and were happy we had waited out the storm.

We made it back to Newport by 8:45, got the boat cleaned up and all of our stuff loaded into the van and by 10:30 were back home.

 

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.

July 13 – Art Festival, Rubber Boots, and Queuing up for the Islands

Until now, I hadn’t done any writing on this trip - the days had been too full with activity, so this morning I was up early and sat in the cockpit with my laptop piecing together the previous days’ events. I had considered not writing about this one (as I have done on previous trips) but once I get going it comes fast and feeds my compulsion to document, to record, to create, to write.

The sun had returned with a vengeance and it was going to be upwards of 30 degrees today. We took the tender into the city and walked up to Nathan Phillips Square where the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair was in full swing. We visited every artist stall and saw some incredible art pieces, everything from paintings of fruit bowls to elaborate sculpture, blown glass, silk prints, and abstractions of all varieties. But for me, the most powerful art statement came when I passed a dude on the street in rubber  boots wearing a shirt that read, “I hate rubber boots”. Big cities = interesting people doing weird things.

We had an ice cream then wandered the city for a while. We passed a clothing store called Brandy Melville that must have had a hundred girls queued up in a line outside waiting to get in, and they all looked just like Stella and her friends. Another huge queue formed by the Pirate Taxis headed out to the islands, but this one was packed with outrageously dressed gay dudes, undoubtedly headed for Hanlon’s Beach, the nude and primarily gay beach on the islands where you can let your eggs hang free and your willy swing in the wind.

Ana and I returned to the boat for a little chill out session, then hit the pool for a cool down, then took a long and slow dinghy ride through the islands under the protection of our wide-brimmed hats. We passed by one of the ferry terminals and I was shocked to see literally a thousand people or more rammed into these cattle herding stations waiting to catch a ferry back to the mainland. This is why you visit the islands during the week.

After a late dinner on the boat we settled into the cockpit to plan out the next few days, but I wasn’t much help as I fell asleep instantly.

July 12 – Island Lounging, Baby Peacocks, and a Dinner with Team Olson

“Well, it’s my last day in Toronto Dad, I wonder what I should do?” said Stella, shortly after her awakening ceremonies had been completed. Her and her brother would be staying at his place tonight then taking an early train back home the next morning.

“Options are unlimited here,” I said. “What would you like to do?”

“Maybe I should find a yoga class.”

“Come help me with the boat projects this morning and I’ll teach you boat yoga – it’s way more effective than a class,” I said as I stretched down into a Warrior Two position with wire strippers in my hand.

“Uh, well maybe I’ll see if I can find a cooking class instead.”

“Easy, why don’t you help us make lunch and supper – you’ll learn far more making boat meals than listening to those Toronto chef-phonies,” I said as I double flipped a spatula and spun a tomato on the tip of my finger.

“I’m going to see if Mom has any ideas.”

Today was the first day in a very long time that I hadn’t woken up to thoughts of boat maintenance. We’d done some significant boat improvement projects this year and I realized this has weighed heavily on me as they had been outside of my comfort level and produced a fair bit of anxiety. Putting the wraps on the solar wiring was a major milestone and I was able to test my completed solar power setup today to excellent results.

We left National shortly after 11am and motored the short distance across the Inner Harbour to Island Yacht Club, another of our favourites on the lake. We checked in with the dockmaster and tried to pay but were told we had paid already. We weren’t sure how that was possible as we they did not have an online payment option, but maybe they had our credit card on file from previous visits. We didn’t see any charges on our card but weren’t going to argue with her as she insisted we were all set.

It was a beautiful, hot day with not a cloud in sight so our second order of business after first tracking down the resident peacocks with their two freshly born peacock babies, was to settle down at the club’s pool. It was glorious. I was one of two men there and the rest were the “ladies who lunch” or, in this case, marinate in the pool all day with fancy cocktails mixed up by the poolside bartender. I imagined all their husbands at work making business calls, doing deals, liquidating assets, investing in projects, and developing sweat stains in the armpits of their high end collared shirts while I was here nodding off in a lounge chair soaking up the sun. Life is good.

We wandered back to the boat around 4pm and I sat on the back of SeaLight for a beer and a Cuban cigar watching the swans floating around in the bay as reggaeton played on the stereo. The girls were downstairs in the AC and I just sat there by myself thinking of little, doing little, and relishing in the luxury of an empty mind.

At 4:30, right on cue to ruin the start of the weekend for the workers, the black clouds rolled in out of nowhere and it started to rain. And it rained hard. This has been a common occurrence this summer with rain appearing regularly on Friday evenings, Saturdays, and Sunday which is the ultimate piss-off after a series of beautiful weekdays.

Ana, Stella and I donned our rainsuits and took the free courtesy tender into the city as we were taking the kids out for dinner on our last night together. We took the long walk east across downtown back to the St. Lawrence Market area and got a table at the Hothouse restaurant, a place we’ve never visited but the menu looked great. Magnus arrived shortly after we were seated and we were served four incredible meals, which we ate slowly as we talked and laughed.

I took a mental photo of us in that restaurant which I will store away as a moment I felt exceptionally proud of my family. We still feel like a team despite the kids now breaking out on their own and Ana and I moving into a different phase of our lives. I relished this moment as I know they will become less frequent in the coming years, which means we just need to appreciate them more when they happen.

After getting swarmed on a street corner by a bridal party mob of Toronto ladies in short red skirts looking for some Friday evening party action, we grabbed Ana a coffee from Timmy’s, said goodbye to the kids, then had a long, slow walk back to the pickup location where we caught the last boat to the island.

We were back to a team of two and the weekend had arrived in the big city.

July 11, 2024 - Island Tour and Drone Show

Today was Dad’s last day here so after the mandatory boat work (fixed the starter battery charging system and changed the engine belt), Stella, Dad and I took the dinghy out to explore the Toronto Islands. I expect that most Canadians who haven’t visited Toronto probably don’t know about the islands, but they are truly amazing. Ana took a pass on the trip as she had some work to catch up on for our yacht club. She started as the Director of Marketing and Volunteers at the end of last year and it has turned into a substantial role that requires a great deal of time, so most nights at home she is tapping away on the laptop long after I’ve gone to bed. It’s good to have overachievers on the Board!

We wound our way through the island at slow speed, enjoying the bird traffic, watching the people on shore, passing paddleboarders and kayakers, then stopped at Centre Island for a long walk. Midweek is the best time to visit as weekends on the islands are packed full of people. We walked along the pathways and trails, to the beach, then to the amusement park there where we found a young lad serving ice cream cones so we asked for three. They were the tiniest ice creams I’d ever seen, and Stella’s even had a big hole through what little ice cream was there, so I sent that one back for retooling. Five bucks doesn’t get you much of an ice cream on Centre Island.

My dad was really impressed with these islands just a stone’s throw from the biggest city in Canada. It’s not what you would expect and is just one of the surprises this incredible city has to offer.

We returned to the boat and Ana had finished her work and was ready to do something so her and Stella went out to pick up some groceries while Dad and I stayed back to prepare late lunch and do more damage to the red wine in a box.

Lunch was magnificent – grilled potato packs with mushrooms, peppers, onions, and fresh herbs then sirloin steaks, corn, and salad. We ate slowly, had wine, and enjoyed our final time together until it was time to go. Instead of taking a low class Uber or dirty public transit or walking in the heat, Dad and I jumped in the dinghy and within 7 minutes I had dropped him off on shore just a short walk from Union Station where he would catch a train to Pearson airport.

Which left three.

But not for long.

Daryl and Lydia came over for dinner and were happy to eat up the lunch leftovers. We also had a surprise – our buddy Sharon from Newport, who was hanging out in Toronto for the day while her husband Greg (of Greg’s Island fame) was working in Pickering. We had a jolly time in SeaLight’s cockpit, then later moved over to National’s cozy fire pit, where there was not just a roaring fire, but we also got to see a drone show taking place somewhere around Ontario Place, as did Stella, but from on the water as she had taken the dinghy out for a nighttime solo ride. There must have been a thousand drones in the sky to create the lighted spectacles we saw – words spelled out in the sky, images, patterns, faces, and everything moving in perfect synchronicity. I had never even heard of drone light shows, but I’ll be watching for them now.
Greg made a brief appearance then he and Sharon left for Newport, Daryl and Lydia returned to their boat at Alexandria, and we retired to SeaLight for the night.