Picture above is right outside our marina. Need I say more as to why we stayed???

Friday, August 17, 2007
Port Elgin, Ontario

The neighbors were up last night until the weeeee hours of the morning chatting and having a good time. I felt like an intruder most of the night because I couldn't help but listen to their conversations all night. I don't think they meant to be so loud, but I couldn't sleep over the laughter - don't know how their kids did it.

Wow, there's a definite chill to the air this morning. It's coldddd. This is August? Seven degrees Celsius? Sometime during the night our burgee and courtesy flag stopped beating the halyard so I jumped up this morning, put on the coffee and quickly dressed to take out the trash and check out the water conditions at the mouth of the harbor coming into Port Elgin. I couldn't get connected on the computer to see what they were forecasting so thought I'd give it a visual to see if we could at least get out of the harbor and on to the next one. It still looks a little choppy on the horizon but not to bad and there are clouds rising in the distance - dark and building, so I raced back to the boat from the seawall to turn on the radio to get the marine forecast.

The forecast still hadn't changed from yesterday - except for one small item... a waterspout was thrown in... What the heck? So they're still calling for 20-30 knot winds this morning and waves building from 1 to 3 to 4 meters early afternoon. Thunderstorms in the afternoon, and now waterspouts... just imagine if 3 Abens were here, what the weather would be like...

Well I think I'll warm up the cabin by making some muffins...

After having muffins and coffee for breakfast, I decided to take a walk to find a payphone so I could phone my mom. After phoning (a lot of these payphones don't take credit cards) I headed up Green Street to explore and see if I could find a grocery store. It looks like they rent out a lot of cottages in this area - I kept seeing rental signs and signs that said "Watered by Sand Point". About 8 blocks up I spotted a streetlight and figured that must be where the main road is. I saw a woman carrying plastic bags so figured she'd walked to the store. I asked her "where is a grocery store around here?" and she said "ohhh, a long ways up". "you need to go way up the road then turn left" so I figured I was on the right track and kept walking. It was about an hour into town and an hour back. Very cute, well-manicured houses and neighborhoods and when I got to town it had several used book stores and a great old library. Several little caf�'s a couple of icecream places, a Chinese restaurant, a couple of clothing places and a hardware store. Never did find a grocery store. I did find a Salvation Army store and wandered into there. All kinds of stuff and actually crowded in there too. After an hour, I figured Wayne might be searching for me now so I headed back to the boat. I was gone for about 3 hours - hour there, hour back and and hour in the library, bookstores, etc... Wayne had cleaned out the garage (back berth) and was reading up on sailboat electrical systems. His project is to fix what Tower screwed up...

I got back to the boat just in time - the winds really started howling so I checked out the weather. They'd changed the forecast so now we were expecting 30mph winds with 45 mph gusts and T Storms... Glad we didn't go out. We started getting whitecaps IN the marina and the waves were something else out there. It got really wild with the waves crashing into the jetty and breakwaters. The sand was blowing and sandblasting everything downwind of the beach and of course I had to run and get my camera.

Beautiful straight-line clouds and a series where you could actually see a cold front wedging in under the warmer air and making clouds along the boundary.

We walked out to take pictures along the pier and grab a coney from the restaurant (did I mention they had banana fudge icecream? Ymmmm) and noticed that the dock we were on had given way down near the end. It was sagging in the water, held up by electrical lines.... So we notified them at the office first before going to eat and take pictures. The girl in the office said they'd heard about it but their first priority was to make sure that all the cleats were tightened down so none of the boats got loose in the winds and waves. We actually hit those 45mph winds they were predicting - in the marina where we were protected. Amazing.... The winds kept splashing the water up over the breakwater as I tried to take pictures of the sunset tonight. Kids were playing in it of course...

Weather is predicting to calm down tomorrow so we may be able to get out of here if the channel isn't awash in rock and debris...