Gary Harkins
08/09/2009, Collins Inlet, Killarney, Lansdowne Channel

We had thunderstorms very early this morning and it is now just raining. We are going to see if we can get a weather window that will allow us to ready the boat to travel. If we do we will go to Little Current and anchor out across the channel from the town docks. That way we will be able to dinghy over to use the towns wifi and maybe go to breakfast tomorrow morning. We would get a slip again but Little Current charges $73.50/night and that's with the exchange rate in Canada's favor by about 8%. Patty is going to make blueberry pancakes and bacon this morning while we wait to see if the weather will give us a break. Buster is laying quietly, apparently not desperate to go out in this rain either! I hope he can wait until it stops raining, if not my foulies are going to need to be hung in the standing shower to dry. OOPS!...Patty just finished the first pancake, but she forgot to put the blueberries in it! She put extras in the next one and gave me the two of them as a stack.

It stopped raining and I took Buster to shore. We got the boat ready to travel and had the anchor up and were underway by 1200. We backtracked through the Collins Inlet and back through the Killarney channel. We traveled down the Lansdowne Channel until we got to Snug Harbor. We thought that we would change plans and anchor there for the evening. There were quite a few boats already there and it was a bit crowded. We were having trouble getting our anchor to hold and took that as an omen that we should go somewhere else. We finished the trip back through the Lansdowne Channel and went south of Heywood Island to an anchorage between Strawberry Island and Beaver Island. The position here is Lat 45d 55.0m N Long 081d 51.7m W. It is very quiet here; the only other boat in a very large bay is a sailboat that is apparently associated with a cottage about a mile north on Beaver Island. We settled in, Buster got his evening fetching routine and I took a swim. Patty is below practicing her Irish Whistle. We are having burgers and a salad for dinner. This is the last of the venison burger that we brought so we'll have to eat store bought burger the rest of our vacation.

The picture is of one of the channel markers in the Collins Inlet.

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Gary Harkins
08/08/2009, Collins Inlet

Buster partaking in his favorite sport. The pink disc in the water is a soft frisbee which he will fetch as many times as I am willing to throw it!

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Gary Harkins
08/08/2009, Collins Inlet

Today is kind of a dreary day. It is overcast and windy. It goes without saying that it is not particularly warm, since all of the days we have been here have been significantly below normal. Tomorrow is forecast to hit 80. If it comes true it will be the first day out of the low 70's since we have been here. We've got our fingers crossed!!! Maybe Al Gore should come up here and give a lecture on global warming! I'm thinking the locals and the boating community would drive him out of town on a rail! Because it is kind of marginal weather we will just hang out in Mill Lake today. Tomorrow we will start working our way back to the west. We need to be in Detour by 8-18 to make the trip back south. Short hops and spending time in some of our favorite anchorages will make the trip back to Detour seem more tolerable. Another boat pulled in to our end of Mill Lake and anchored about 300 feet from us. I notice that they have a wind generator of the same brand name as ours. I'll have to go over and talk wind generators with them.

It's now 1930 and it has been one nasty day. We went for a dinghy ride around the extreme southern end of Mill Lake. It spit rain a couple of times and the winds were bitter cold. Patty was bundled up like it was winter. The other boat with the wind generator has a 10 year old version of the one I have. He says that it doesn't perform as well as he would like. I find that mine is falling a little short of my expectations also. The problem is that the amount of energy available in the wind goes up exponentially with the wind speed. Because of the blade configuration on the generator you get six times as much energy every time the wind speed doubles. The wind today has been just enough to keep the batteries in the same state of charge, not adding to or allowing a decrease in the charge level. Patty made a goulash dish for dinner. It was very tasty and helped to warm us up. The wind has died for the evening so the batteries will be discharging as we continue to use power this evening. I guess I really can't complain since we normally would have had to run the gasoline generator several times by now and we haven't had to run it even once!

The picture is of me taking Buster's ramp off the hanging davits so I can allow Buster to fetch his frisbee.

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