It was a very bold trip for our first time out, and as it turned out, an enormous adventure. Our maiden voyage was both enthralling and addictive.

|BEGINNING| |DAY 1| |DAY 2| |DAY 3 & 4| DAY 5| DAY 6| DAY 7 & 8| DAY 9|

ANOTHER STORMY STORY, our trip down the Erie Barge Canal in a 42’ Sail boat

We purchased our 37 foot Owens Grenada, a wooden palace on the water, on October 24, 2000. When I first took my wife to see this boat, she thought that I fell out of my tree. The boat spent several years in Florida before arriving in Pickering Ontario, where I first saw it, and the Florida sun and salty air took their toll on the old girl.

We spent the first ten month of ownership restoring this once beautiful motor yacht to its former glory. A year later, we booked a three week holiday to explore the Thousand Islands in our yacht that we called Karius. This is the story of our experience. It is important to add that we have been boating since 1974, but this was our first big boat experience. It was a very bold trip for our first time out, and as it turned out, an enormous adventure. Our maiden voyage was both enthralling and addictive. But this story starts five days earlier, in Whitby Ontario, our home port.

Our boat before the restoration.

Our boat after the restoration.

THE PERILEOUS DEADLINES

When you are not retired, you are on a deadline to complete your vacation in a certain time frame. This was defiantly the case with us since both of us are still working for a living. Kathy my wife and long time navigator on all of our trips, booked a three week summer holiday in January of 2002. Her employer offers no flexibility to change the dates later in the year, so we were committed to that window. That year I was very busy on a project that kept me out of town for almost five month. We did not have any time to work on the boat prior to our holiday. On the first day of our holiday, the boat was still sitting in the yard.

Partly because we had never done a big trip before and wanted to do everything just right, and partly because I had left some unfinished work from previous year, readying the boat for going in the water took longer than I anticipated. . We also needed some updated safety equipment, a dingy and a motor, and some way of carrying the dingy on the back of the boat. All of this required lot of running around to all corners of Toronto, and none of this included any of the mechanical preparations, like engine tune-up, replacing broken hoses and stiff sea cocks, work that is normally prudent before a big trip. Consequently, we used up the first week of our holidays on the preparations.

When we finally put the boat in the water on July 26, the weather was not in our favour. Winds had picked up and there was talk of thunderstorms. We waited until Wednesday, but eventually decided that if we don’t go the next morning, we will have little time left to complete our Thousand Island journey. After some major complications with the dingy davits, which had to be scraped Thursday morning in favour of just towing the dingy behind us, we left Whitby harbour around 1:30 pm.