Our trip today has taken us to the Northern tip of Grenadier Island at an island called Adelaide. It was a quiet, but shallow anchorage. We enjoyed a few days here and was the most relaxing part of our trip.
As we arrived, our excitement built as we we found an open mourning bouy! YES! These things are gold around here! Using our dock hook, Lori pulled up the center of the buoy to find it’s just a chain that freely moves through the center of the float with a U-bolt on the end. We looked around and it appeared that others tied off something like this. Not sure it’s 100% correct, but it worked while we were there.
Payment was pretty simple, on the island there’s a metal box with envelopes. You can either put in cash or enter your credit card information. Price was $19.60 CAD or $15.68 USD per night. There is a limit of four consecutive nights per island.
Sounds like everything went smoothly? Nope. Not this time. Two things happened. As we are getting ready to tie off, and learning from our bad experience at Thousand Islands – Mulcaster Island Gavin untied our Dinghy from the back and attached it to the side of the boat so the tow lines wouldn’t be anywhere close to engine prop. Nobody noticed that the knots were not secure. Until after we celebrated our successful first use of a mooring buoy we saw…
That’s our dinghy slowly floating away. Gavin was able to quickly swim out to fetch it. The water was amazing, btw.
Second issue was with one of our rudders. I’m not a big fan of how they are tied up and down through the cleat. While we were maneuvering for the buoy one of the lines slipped and the rudder went down and hit a rock as I was backing up. It is pretty shallow around the spot we chose and bad luck of being above the tallest rock when this happened. Used the magic of duct tape to apply a temporary patch.
This is a beautiful spot in the Thousand Islands, and one of the quieter places to go because of the distance from the other main marinas. The island has limited facilities other than a covered picnic area and a very clean cedar chip outhouse. Swimming is nice, the water is clean, clear and warm. In the distance you can see the big tankers cruising by in the channel. They are strangely quiet and move with speed.
Update: Looking back on these pictures I now notice I was typing off the cleat incorrectly. There is a much cleaner and efficient way to do it with a single wrap and a twist, look up “Cleat Hitch”.
We are now making more use of our dinghy. At least some of us are. Gavin, Owen and myself rowed in to used the washroom and Owen mischievously left Gavin and I to swim back. As I was talking with the park ranger Lori decided to help us out by bringing the dinghy back to us. We all heard a splash and then Lori laughing. Pulling herself, her completely soaked towel and sunglasses up over the side of the dinghy. Yup, somehow she stepped down onto it, but missed, completely. Wish we saw it. Lori is still laughing about it.
Chatted with a few of the other boaters, everyone is always so happy and friendly. We spent a bit of time talking with Doug from “Lost Together Again” and he and his wife retired early and spend most of their time out here. Rough life.
We stayed up late into the night and everyone snuggled up in blankets on the foredeck. It was a beautiful warm night and the stars were amazing, with little light pollution you can see everything. Then Owen pipes up with excitement, “This is the first time I’ve actually seen the Milky Way!”. This was his highlight of the trip.
I cheated, this is not my picture, but the sky really was this clear.
We stayed at this location for two nights, and not much to report other than a whole lot of relaxation happened. Books were read, nooks and crannies on the shores were explored for critters, tasty food was eaten and good wine was enjoyed.
Lessons Learned
- As you are coming into dock or a mooring buoy make sure you are prepared. Go through your checklist. We are getting better at this, but now it’s double-checking everything is done correctly.
Leave a Reply