Sailing

“Other Adventures” may well including sailing the high seas . . or in this case, Lake Superior. 

For the past 25 years, we’ve lived on the shore of this Great Lake and shortly after moving in to the house, we bought a sailboat. Now before you get all “yacht-y”, it’s a Grampian 26, a slow and old fibreglass boat from 1972 that I got inexpensively, and it has five features that I absolutely wanted:

1: standing headroom in the cabin

2: inboard diesel engine

3: rolling furler jib (foresail)

4: autopilot

5: spinnaker  

This boat’s primary purpose has been, over the past two decades, to sail me, and whatever willing accomplice I can scrape up, from the marina where she over-winters, to my mooring ball in the bay in front of my home. And back in the fall.

I usually also get out 3-4 times over the summer for a day sail around the bay, or sail to a nearby island for a picknick.

One neighbour, somewhat unkindly, has referred to the boat as “The bauble in the bay.”

 But I’m happy to have the boat there as a reminder of our connection to the water, and the day-long sail out to the mooring in the spring, and back to the winter storage in the fall, are enough for me even if that’s all I do. 

In that whole time, only once did I not bring it out, that was the year we were having major renovations gone to the house, in 2008.

Today was spent getting the boat, named “Fire and Water” ready for launch.  “Getting ready for launch” means pumping all of the collected rainwater /  snowmelt out of the bilge, trying to clean up the boat in general, putting in the batteries, re-setting the boom (the mast stays up) and just general messing about. 

Re-coiling lines, hooking up the solar panel, seeing what no longer works (we’re down to starter motor still working and autopilot: after the last lightning strike, all the other electronics, like depthfinder, knotmeter, radios, lights, wind direction and speed indicator, etc are all fried and no longer work).

That’s ok.

So that was today - working on the boat. I’ll share some photos from my next visit to “Fire and Water” and share some more stories about her. 

On Saturday, I’ll be motorbiking in the “Ride for Dad,” a prostate cancer fundraiser Father’s Day motorcycle rally of sorts in Thunder Bay.

Perhaps I’ll get done photos of that event.