Tuesday August 26: Pirate's Cove - Guppy's Home

So we are now sitting at Pirate's Cove Marina - home for Guppy for at least the winter - maybe longer. Not sure. One of those plans that is definitely written in the sand.

We arrived here yesterday after spending another rainy cool day at Winter Harbor on Saturday.

Who wants to travel in weather like that??

Saturday then turned into a work day. There was some rewiring needed for the new 110v fridge. The PO (previous owner in boat talk) had wired a couple of outlets using solid wire - like you would use in a house. Boats need to have stranded wire. So wire that's made up of many strands wound together into a single wire. Kind of like speaker wire only heavier.

We also needed to replace the circuit breaker with a heavier one. Fortunately the marina here had everything we needed so that really made it nice.

The projects were completed within a few hours - must be a record for sure! Of course the boat was ripped up again.

Any project means the boat is a wreck getting tools and other necessary items out from under the front bunk.

Sunday - now THIS is the weather we were looking for! Clear skies with a few puffy clouds. Low wind.

Time to go. Our time was going to be short though as we finally came up with a plan for the next few months.

Visit Ohio, visit Matt and Wendy in Newport, visit Becky in LA and then finally return to Yesterday's Dream in Jacksonville, FL.

Leave date: Wednesday 8/27. Yep - that would be tomorrow :-)


In the meantime we headed east on the Erie Canal: destination: Baldwinsville. We were here once four years ago as we had moved aboard the trawler and spent the summer traveling Lake Erie and the western end of the Erie Canal.

The town docks are very nice: free docking and $5 for power. Probably the busiest port we've seen for a while. The downtown has many empty store fronts so I don't know if there is a "new" area for shopping but it appears as though the town is not doing too great.

There are some really magnificent older homes along the side streets. Maybe the town is doing better than it seems.

We stayed only one night - time to head back and start getting the boat ready to be stored.

I loved the "Red Neck Yatch" that was tied near the lock wall. Pretty funny :-)

And compared to the boat on the left, the "Yatch" was doing quite well.

Sad to see a boat just left sunken like this. What it must have been like in its day.

Ok - so where are we really?? And I understand that sometimes cottage/home owners would like to take a shot or two at obnoxious boats (actually I would too for that matter!) but I have to say I have never seen a silhouette like this one before!

Kind of scary .....





Other interesting boats we saw along the way: left is a huge canal boat. It's designed to make it under the 15 1/2 foot fixed bridge that limits many boats from traveling the western end of the Erie Canal (no problem for us in either boat). It looked like it was close to 100 feet long.

The other was a small cruise ship that travels the Erie. Weird design but made for the height limitations of the eastern end of the Canal. We sort of met at the junction of the Oswego Canal - shocked me to see it as we came around the corner!

Great wildlife day with duck and turtles sharing the same log. Tons of turtles - so nice to see.

Also nice to see a family of swans.

The young are getting pretty big but are still very gray. Young swans start to turn white at about the age of six months. Weirdly the underneath of the young start turning white first!

There is lots of stuff to take to Ohio. Mostly left over food and canned goods.

But also coming with us is the windshield for Guppy. Sadly it was cracked over the winter due to the amount of snow in Ontario.

Easy solution to this happening: just unscrew the 8 screws holding it down. Next time we'll make sure the marina does that when the boat is shrink wrapped.

In the meantime, we'll see what the House of Plastics in Cleveland can do for us.

Tomorrow: last minute things to finish up, get the car, drive to Julie and Jim's place. It will be weird being off of the  boat for close to 6 weeks to do some car/plane traveling ....

Blog will continue in October when we are back to Yesterday's Dream :-)