The trip over to the island was easy and enjoyable. We entered the harbor after two tour boats had left so there wasn’t a lot of traffic to deal with. Mackinac Island does not have any motorized vehicles. Everyone either walks or rides bikes or horses or horse-drawn carriages. This makes for a unique environment in today’s world. After getting tied up at our slip we headed over to eat lunch at the Pink Pony. We then spent most of…
USA here we come! We had great weather once again so we decided to take the shortest route, which took us across the wide part of the north channel. The travel day was awesome. We arrived at De Tour Village around 2pm and immediately I began the process of contacting US customs. Since we are both trusted travels with global entry, I didn’t expect much trouble. They have a new app that lets you complete the process without leaving the…
I don’t have much to write about today’s trip, other than it was nice weather and we had no issues. We enjoyed the staff at Blind River Marina, who did a good job getting us situated. Since the following day will be returning to the US, and doing customs, we decided to eat all our food rather than declare it.
We had a nice easy cruise around some beautiful islands as we made our way from Killarney to Little Current. There is a swing bridge that only opens on the hour, so I set our speed so we arrived just at the top of the hour.
I noticed that this day had the best chance of good weather and low wind that we would see for a few days, so we decided to make the trip all the way to Killarney. This would be a 56 nautical mile trip with about 15 miles out in the open water. The weather turned out to be as advertised. We enjoyed calm seas and brilliant skies for the entire trip. The wind only kicked up once we arrived at…
Today was a fairly long trip but the scenery made it enjoyable. We spent much of the time making sure we avoided the rocks. Our cruising speed was therefore about 6 knots for most of the day. Our marina today was a “rustic” place up the Bing Inlet.
After a somewhat sleepless first night at anchor we decided to press on. The weather was beautiful but somewhat windy. In the few open water stretches there were 1 to 2 foot seas. Not as bad as some that we have encountered, but less comfortable than we would like. We made the 25 mile trip to a marina at Killbear, which had good clean showers and a quiet restaurant on the premises.
Today we took a ride on the Big Chute Marine Railway. The idea is that there are two bodies of water separated by some land. They built a boat carrier that runs on rails to carry boats from one body of water to the other. It is pretty cool and definitely unusual. The ride was great because of the view. We rode on the bow of our boat for the whole trip, which lasted less than 10 minutes. Before we…
Today started with rain, so we decided to wait and see what the weather did later on. We walked into town where they had blocked off traffic for the annual classic car show. There were cars from Model T to Corvette on display. We went to the farmer’s market as well. After a nice lunch, the rain had subsided so we returned to the boat and were soon on our way. We encountered one more patch of rain but that…
The reason we stopped where we did was mainly because we did not want to cross Lake Simcoe until morning. So this morning we transited the final two locks on the east side of the lake and then entered the lake for the 12 mile trip up to Orillia. We had a reservation for a couple of nights at the Port of Orillia marina. This is an excellent marina with nice showers, free laundry, and easy grocery access. So it…