#57 A Stop at Midland, Ontario

We stopped in Midland, ON to get the boat hauled and a dinged prop straightened. That seems to be a rite of passage for this trip. The day they pulled us they had four other boats to pull, all with prop damage. However, once again things worked out. Our marina in Midland, Bay Port Yacht Centre, is right on the Trans Canada Trail, a beautiful greenway/path that goes for miles and miles. In our case, the mile long ride into town was perfect, it gave us a chance to ride our scooters and enjoy the spectacular view. So while we didn’t like the delay, at least we were in a really nice place.

I don’t know if Cheryl feels this way, but this is how I feel when we get the scooters out:

Midland is a small town, but it has numerous cafes and coffee shops, and most excitingly, two hardware stores and a marine supply store. For a boater, that’s like coming across the Treasure of the Sierra Madre while camping.

Just to keep things interesting, we had a mechanical problem as we came out of lock 45 and entered the Georgian Bay. The port engine overheated and I had to shut it down. Of course my first thought is “oh crap what now?” But as we cruised on to Midland, a short run, on one engine yet again, I figured it out. I had cleaned the strainers on the engines after leaving the Trent and when I replaced the tops, which should seal, the old gaskets were long gone and someone had used some kind of sealer on them. I cleaned all that off and reassembled things, which I have gotten away with many times. However, I didn’t this time. My reward for cutting corners was that the port strainer was sucking air, not water, and so we overheated. So I sealed both strainers properly and replaced both impellers on the engines while we where stopped here. The port one was wrecked from running dry.

I changed the starboard impeller since it is easy to get to, but I had scheduled a mechanic to change the port engine impeller, which is behind the port engine. Then I got to looking at the area and realized that if I laid a board across the stringers I could slide in on that and maybe get to it myself. So I did. Turns out it was actually far easier than I had expected, and now that I know how to get back there, I’m not so worried about getting access just in case I have to fix something else. And I saved a few hundred bucks Canadian on the mechanic!

This is a bicycle! Allowed to park on the sidewalk, apparently. Saw several of them around town.

Just a giant chrome goose.

This is one small corner of this marina. Pulling into a gargantuan marina like this one in Midland, ON, and some of the big ones in Florida and along the east coast feels like sailing into an unscripted, high-seas reality show where the dress code ranges from “I own a private island” to “I haven’t washed these boardshorts since 2014.” To your left just feet away sits a pristine mega-yacht gleaming fiercely in the sun, polished so perfectly it seems to repel fingerprints, seagulls, and reality itself. To your right, a rust-streaked home-made sailboat that appears to be held together entirely by hardware store parts, duct tape, and optimism. It is a gloriously chaotic parking lot of dreams, where weathered sea captains with grizzled beards rub shoulders with freshly minted and still clueless retirees struggling to untangle the line on a fender. The air is a potent cocktail of open water, diesel fuel, sunshine, and fiberglass epoxy, backed with the rhythmic clinking of rigging lines—the universal heartbeat of a community where everyone, whatever they may be floating on, is united by the sacred, shared delusion that owning a boat is a wise and rational financial decision.

Interestingly, we have met a number of couples, and even a couple of solo sailors, who haven’t owned a house in eight or ten years. Instead, they’ve spent that time roaming the country in RVs, returning to the same campgrounds year after year. They followed the seasons—Arizona to Montana, or Florida to Canada—then eventually decided to buy a cruising boat. Somewhere along the way they discovered the Great Loop, and now they’re doing that too. In the winter they simply park the boat, take the RV south, and keep on traveling. That’s pretty extraordinary.

It makes me wonder about two things. First, what does a lifestyle like that cost each year? This is an expensive way to live. Second, what about all the home appreciation they’ve missed by not owning a house? Think about how much home values have risen over the past decade. Maybe the lost equity doesn’t matter to them, but it certainly would to me.

And then there’s the lifestyle itself. No permanent home base beyond a campground or marina? No thanks. No garage or workshop? Again, no thanks.

Regardless of how they go about it, they’re all extremely interesting people, and I could listen to their stories all day.

Just the other day, for example, I borrowed a file from a fellow who spends four to six months a year here in Canada living on his boat, then flies home to New Zealand to work on his farm. Later he and his wife (Eddie and Bev) came over to the boat and we got to hear how they met, in New Zealand, which happened through a series of very unlikely coincidences. We were also fortunate enough to meet the local AGLCA harbor hosts, Pat and Lynn, who have logged something like 50,000 sailing miles, most of them aboard a sailboat they built themselves. We talked for two hours and barely scratched the surface of the stories they had to tell.

When you consider the people we meet, the situations we get into, and the things we’ve been able to do and see, this is really some kind of astounding lifestyle. Not merely amazing, nope, this just astounds us day after day. It’s a fabulous way to spend a year. If you are reading this and wondering if you could or should consider doing it, the answer is yes.

Had to laugh at ourselves the other day. Here we are at a nice marina, where the showers and facilities are just steps away from the boat. We were congratulating ourselves on getting a slip so close to the showers when we remembered that at home, the shower is actually inside the house, and just steps away from the bed! It’s all relative.

I love Canada, by the way. If it wasn’t frozen solid every winter I’d be up here. Main reason, I think, is the population density is still low everywhere but a few places like Toronto. So it feels like I imagine 1950 felt like. Lots of breathing room, everyone is polite and helpful, they say “sorry,” even when you bump into them, no traffic, no overcrowded interstates, no news media trying to scare you with outrageous headlines, no political signage in sight, and it simply feels safer. Much more of a small town atmosphere, which makes sense since once we entered Canada, we’ve been in nothing but small towns. For example, coming back from the hardware store I came up on a pack of teenage boys on bikes, some of whom looked a bit rough. Rather than being aggressive, they just wanted to compete in a wheelie exhibition with me as I passed them on my scooter.

They won.

This is the bay in July, just a gorgeous scene.

And here’s the exact same bay, just a bit to the right of the other shot, in early spring. An icebreaker!

Cheryl asked how many miles we’ve run so far, so I calculated it. Counting the trip to bring the boat home, which was around 1500 miles, we’ve got some 6,200 miles under our belts. Not bad!

From here, Midland ON, we are bound for the Georgian Bay and the North Channel. We hope to leave Thursday morning, and we want to be near Chicago around Sept 10th.  That’s 43 days.  I have an tentative itinerary for the Georgian Bay and the North Channel, which will take us about seven – ten days of travel.  That puts us on Mackinac Island around or just after August 3rd.  So that gives us 36 days to cruise the coast of Michigan, where we have eight stops planned.  That gives us 4.5 days for each stop, and since we usually only spend 2 days before we’re ready to move on, even with this last delay we actually are still ok on time.  Whew.  I was worried that we were running things too tight, but it still looks good.  That’s great.  Now we can add a couple of nights anchored out if we want, or wait out the weather, and still be ok.  There is no hard and fast rule about being in Chicago the 10th, but based on weather patterns we want to be off the Great Lakes, or close to it, by then.  So, I feel better. It does make me keenly aware of the fact that this trip will indeed end one day, and that day is approaching. Cheryl put it far better than I could, but I feel it coming, like a storm on the horizon.

P.S. Yes, the boat is for sale. We figured that we would list it and if it happens to sell, so be it, and if it doesn’t, well then we are happy with that as well. But if we don’t list it, there’s no chance it would sell, so there ya go. As Cheryl mentioned, when we bought MoonShine we had no hard and fast plans to keep her forever. So it seemed to me like it made sense to sell if we can in Michigan, rather than running hundreds of miles down the river system to Knoxville just to list it anyway. Personally, I’ve done the rivers enough that I have zero desire to do any of it again, although I gladly will if we end up bringing the boat home. But no, it is not going to be easy to walk away that last time. A boat is, simply and often quite literally, a magic carpet. This is and has been a magic year in so many ways, and that will indeed be hard to let go.

P.S. 2.0 Wednesday morning, July 29th. Props are on! Went out in the bay for a test run, all good, fueled up and back in the slip. So we’ll leave in the morning, west-bound. Finally!

“Those who believe that anything is possible and fire our imagination over the long haul are often the ones who have survived the bleakest of circumstances themselves. They have every reason to despair, but don’t, so may have the most to teach us.” Paul Rogat Loeb