Saturday 9 August 2008

Rainy but nice ...

We just got back in from a couple of weeks out - we spent the long weekend on the main dock in the bay at Beau Rivage; came in Monday to get ready for a charity cruise on Tuesday we had auctioned of at the Grace Church Budget Booster in May. We had probably the nicest weather we've had all summer on Tuesday and found an empty dock at Camelot. After lunch we cruised down around Mulcaster and up the inside channel. Wednesday morning we headed out again, this time down to the 1000 Islands Bridge. There's almost always space at the North docks on Georgina because boat traffic makes it quite rough there, but we had two great nights with m-in-law (though it rained a good bit of Thursday - bless the hard-top again!!). Friday morning we motored over to Ivy Lea and then made our way to Mulcaster for a night. By this morning our house batteries were dead (no generators allowed on Mulcaster) but we're home, plugged in, ready to go. Tomorrow (pray for good weather) we're out for the day with another family who bought a day's boating at another auction and then we'll pack it in for a couple of weeks as we get ready to travel to England to visit PetDoc and Noise (and Buggy).

btw - while we were at Beau Rivage last weekend I removed the stock swim ladder (a two-step job that swung up and fastened to the stern boarding ladder. We felt that this made climbing the ladder to the boat awkward and as a swim ladder two steps was not quite enough. We replaced it with an under-platform 3-step ladder and it's much more satisfactory. It also increases the amount of space on an already small swim platform.

We've been struggling with which kind of dinghy davits to buy and finally settled on the C-hoop style. We've seen a lot of weaver davits pull loose with the stress of leaving the outboard motor on the dinghy and we liked the idea of being able to offset the dinghy to one side or the other if necessary. We also sprung for the swivel motor bracket (scroll down a bit), allowing us to keep the outboard nearly vertical when carried on the swim platform. Lifting, securing and lowering is really quite easy and the system appears to provide an excellent method for carrying the Zodiac.

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Gananoque, Ontario, Canada