Summer Cruise 2015
On the Way to the Water
This year's summer cruise aboard Sir Tugley Blue (STB) is upon us. We have had an extremelybusy Spring with a trip to Florida for a couple of weeks to visit Judy's brother and his wife in Florida, a week of solid work getting the boat ready for launch followed by another week or so of boat projects before we left for a trip out West to visit friends in Phoenix, AZ. From AZ, we embarked on a 2000 mile road trip taking in Sedona, the Grand Canyon, Santa Fe, Taos, and a long drive to Dallas for the wedding of our friends' (WJ and Tracy Teel) son, Calloway and his fiancee, Michelle.
We arrived home from Dallas late Sunday evening and headed to the boat Tuesday morning after a frantic day of appointments, shopping, paying bills, etc. We managed to avoid a severely overloaded car this year by cutting back on what we took to the boat (Oh, wait a minute - I did take a car load before we went to Phoenix!). Nevertheless, after living out of suitcases for most of the past two months, we have finally realized (after 60+ years) that you never wear 2/3 of the clothes you pack. With this in mind, we managed to whittle down our clothes significantly. This was important as what goes with us has to come back from NY at the end of the cruise.
I don't know why we do this to ourselves, but every year boat projects continue to develop, often at the last moment.
New Hatch to the Upper Deck
We added Marinedeck 2000 (a cork product) to the floor of the stern cockpit and, in doing so, we had to remove the ladder that goes to the upper deck.
It was amazing how much extra space this gave in this normally tight spot for two chairs. Access from the port side of the boat was also significantly improved. "Normal" people would have thought nothing more about this and would have put the ladder back. We, however, look on something like this as an "opportunity" and ended up creating "another Project" to improve a boat that most consider well thought out. We now have a hinged ladder that folds flat to the back of the salon - just another two-day job when we were already up to our eyes in work.
Before and After
The purchase of a new hard bottom dinghy and motor created the opportunity for another project, adding an electric winch to our davits to lift the significantly heavier load. With the engineering, design, fabrication and installation this turned into another 4-day project. My polishing of STB's upperworks kept moving down the list and I will be working on that as we travel North!
On the plus side, we did a thorough bow to stern sort-out of STB and removed a fairly significant amount of "unnecessary stuff" to our garage before we left. Of course, three days into the trip, we will find out we need something but "Dar'n it, it's at home." Oh well, Frankfort has a good hardware store!
Our Plan
Our cruise this summer will begin at White Lake just north of Muskegon, MI, and head up the Lake Michigan coastline to meet up with Bob and Jan, our friends on "Wings," in Charlevoix and then travel together up to the Soo Locks where we will rendezvous will meet up with our Canadian friends, Randy and Audrey on "Heart Tug." Towards the end of June each year, Sault St. Marie holds a Tug Boat Festival with a number of different events including races from point to point. These are the big tugs used for moving commercial shipping around not like ours.
From there, we will head into the North Channel and northern Georgian Bay for most of the summer.. Towards the end of the summer, we'll head down Georgian Bay to the Trent - Severn Canal to repeat part of our 2013 cruise and end up at Kingston, Ontario. From there, it will be a short run to the start of the St. Lawrence Seaway where we will leave the boat in Alexandria Bay, NY, for the winter. Our intent is to pick the boat up next year and travel up the Rideau Canal to Ottawa, down the River to Montreal and the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and then continue east to Nova Scotia and eventually complete the Down East Circle Route. We have no intention of doing the whole trip next year but will play it by ear as we normally do.
We will be keeping a blog of our travels and, as usual, will try to stay reasonably up to date. Much depends on the availability of internet connections up north but will do our best.
Click on BLOG below to go to the first page of our 2015 Blog.