We may be building an interest in weekend cruising at our local club. Most of the membership is into racing. It may be a situation that the races are mostly conducted in the evenings during the week and they want their weekends to do something else but regardless there had seemed to be a dearth of interest in the past for a Friday night departure and the weekend spent at an anchorage somewhere away from the home port. This is what Barb and I had planned to do this summer and when we were out to our Commodore’s house for dinner last night and happened to mention it, they said that it was the one thing that they missed from their old club back in Ontario. So, it now looks like they will be joining us with these mini cruises, or rather we will be joining them since with Barb’s commitment to the local farmer’s market on Saturday AM we wouldn’t be able to get away until noon that day so hopefully we will be joining them in a mini raft wherever they have found a spot to stop. Hopefully, if we get into this sort of thing with a reasonable degree of frequency, others might be encouraged to join us and it will become an accepted thing. It could even be a means of getting the social membership out on the water and away from the bar. This all started when I asked the question, did the club have a cruising program, only to find out that they not only didn’t, but in the past there hadn’t seemed to be an interest in it. Perhaps this summer we could develop some. We have several sites that a quick chart recce shows us: at the anchorage inside the horseshoe at McNutt’s Island, at several places around Cape Negro (pronounced nay-grow) Island, and in literally dozens more little spots along the coast in the various bays and inlets between here and Liverpool. Most of these spots are wonderfully isolated whether they are on remote islands or on the mainland where there simply aren’t any roads to bring motorists too close. Of course there are also places that are close to those aforementioned roads if that happens to spin your wheel too. Barb and I tend to look for places that we have some privacy and where the noise of civilization is muted if not absent altogether.

The weather here is making me long increasingly for southern climes and warm temperatures and sandy beaches. We just have to wait for Barb’s surgery on the other knee. That’s another thing that I am looking forward to – being able to have her join me on watches with her having an increased level of self confidence physically and me being able to sleep below without being worried whether she is ok on deck. Add to that the pleasure of tramping about ashore without her knees acting up at an inconvenient time and it would seem to be a great formula for cruising.

Speaking of the weather, in spite of some recent aberrations and although the daily highs are below the 30 year average high, the daily lows are definitely well above the average daily lows, at least according to Weather Canada statistics. Still when you compare what we are getting to the historical data of even Fernandina Beach at the northernmost part of Florida the average high and low is 63 and 44 respectively, which I would be quite happy with, and if we were to get down to the southernmost part in Key West that becomes 76 and 64, both sets of data are for the month of January. In the brief research that I did to get the info for this blog I wasn’t able to find and trend data which would be really interesting to review. I’ll keep looking.