22 July 2014

Every morning at 9AM is a radio program on VHF channel 71 from Little Current, about 60 miles west of where we are. It starts off with the weather forecast. The forecast has a storm with wind gusts to 50km per hour (~27 miles per hour). Not a good day to anchor out.

Lots of cruisers in the area check in and tell their boat name, where they are and where they are going. It’s useful since people can try to catch up with each other. Lots of people were either in the Bad River or heading towards the Bad River. Including us.

The combination of lots of people, small anchorage and lots of wind, added to not being sure of the waters made us think twice. Since there is always “Plan B” we decided to head back 6 miles to Britt and spend the night at Wright’s Marina. So we put all of our gear away and headed out.

On the way out of Sandy Bay we passed a milestone in our trip, we’ve gone 1,000 miles! It was our 88th day since leaving home. It ends up being about 12 miles a day, not much. We’ve only been on the move 42 days, that makes it about 25 miles a day. We’ve spent a lot of time in Canada and we’ve enjoyed every moment of it.

We went past Cunningham’s again, this time we knew to take pictures of the island! The skeleton fishing made us both laugh again. In little over an hour we were at the Wright’s Marina dock.

On my list of things to get done was to get the fuel and oil filters replaced. I also had an oil pressure sensor that needed changed, the bad one bounced the pressure needle all over the place.

While that was going on we could see storm clouds in the distance forming up. We also watched three of the local boats come in. They were all talking about the storm and how they also decided to come in where there was some level of safety. One Captain said they “chickened out”, I said a better word was prudent.

John in the boat in front of us gave an invitation to “Happy Hour”. When I popped out of the boat, I had expected just us, instead there were 10 people sitting in chairs around his boat. Wow. I was told that “Happy Hour” happened every day, just the number of people changed.

So we all sat and chatted for about an hour as the sky got darker and darker and thunder rolled down the river. Susan had expressed interest in going out to dinner so I went to the office to see if I could borrow the marina car. I gathered up Susan and we made the car just as the first few fat drops of rain fell from the sky.

Britt is a very small place, there is one restaurant and one ice cream stand. So it made dinner choices pretty easy. While it poured outside she had the pan fried pickerel dinner, I went with a simple bacon cheeseburger.

While we were at “Happy Hour”, our dock neighbor, Pierre had mentioned Henvey Inlet. Over dinner we talked it over and decided that we would stop there on our way to the Bad River. After dinner we went to the local general store and picked up some extra items for our next week of anchoring out.

When we got back, there was a smaller group eating at the picnic table at the end of the dock. Susan went in to bed and I joined for another hour of conversation.

In the morning I tracked down Pierre and he gave us two spots in Henvy to go fishing and made a strong suggestion that we then go to the Bustard Islands and hang out there, then go on to the Bad River.

Part of being a Looper is the ability to get discounts or special offers. The offer at Wright’s was a deal, a free pump out. Since most of the area is rock, septic services are a challenge. Most marina’s charge $20 and up, so a free pump out was a good deal. Fuel prices were also the lowest we had seen in Canada, it made sense to top off the tanks.

With bills paid, letters and postcards to home mailed, full fuel tanks and secret spots for Henvy, we set out to retrace part of our route.