Miscalculations

The splashing in the water went on for a good while. The water was quite warm and even though the air temperature was not that high and the sun was behind the clouds, there was no wind.

Andres wanted to learn to do the back flip. The first time he got his courage together he flipped over unevenly, but hit the water below the waist. That did not deter him to try again, but this time he forgot to heed my advice to push away from the boat with his legs and as he was spinning in the air he hit Salty Ginger with his head. That was quite painful, so after he took a very short breather, he didn’t attempt the flips anymore, but still continued to jump into the water. We called our uncle in Moscow to wish him a happy birthday and the craziness on the boat gave him plenty of material for joking with us.

Dima and Alex helped me raise the anchor. For them everything is a new experience, so Dima ended up making a short video and sent it to his wife. Her reaction was not quite expected: “did you change him at least once since you arrived?”

Out of gas

Since it seemed rather windless, we started to motor in the direction of Baddeck. In the end we could have sailed into Baddeck, but it would have been all upwind and given that it was already lunch time, that would have cut into our time in the village. Julia, who was finishing cooking the fish soup, called me, “is it possible that we ran out of cooking gas?” Sure enough, we did: the pressure at the regulator was zero. Luckily we had the burner that they brought along, so we ended up having soup with potatoes that were cooked through.

Baddeck Marine assigned us to a mooring way outside of the main mooring field. I reserved the mooring to be able tuck away from the remnants of the hurricane, which is staying to the northeast of us, but had the storm actually hit us here with 30 knots, the fetch of St Patricks Channel would have made the mooring very uncomfortable, and we might have actually been forced to look for a more sheltered anchorage. The night was practically windless and the forecast for today does not call for more than 20 knots of wind.

I was optimistic about finding a way to refill the tanks, but Aron at the marina could not come up with a way to get me driven some 45 minutes away — the closest points where one can find propane. His recommendation was to go talk to people at the sailing club or find a 20-pound tank at the hardware store. Off I went to the hardware store and saw a hose that maybe would have made it possible to use the small tanks. But I wanted to be sure that the threads fit, so I took the marina launch back to Salty Ginger, removed the hose that connects the tanks to the gas line and headed back. The hose that I was eyeing initially had a completely different thread, so it was useless. But then I noticed that the adapter to the small tanks, the last one in the store, had a second set of threads that matched the threads of the tanks. Yay! I got the adapter, a few more tanks and headed to a bistro for a beer and some alone time. The crew were still in the museum.

Thinking about it, I should have had the adapter from the start: it will be nice to have a backup in the long run. I also think that it may be the case that I didn’t tighten the hose in the tank tight enough and a small leak over the last 2 weeks was enough to lose a good part of the gas: based on my previous experience, a tank should last a month when we cook on a regular basis.

Not really trespassing

While I was finishing my beer, everyone else went to the grocery store. The small complication was that it was starting to rain and I wanted to avoid having to do 2 long runs from the marina dinghy dock to Salty Ginger. First I found a park which cut the distance to a half. Then while I was waiting, I saw a girl coming off a private dock and asked her if it’d be ok to use their dock to get people onto the boat. She went to ask her parents, who said that it’d be fine. That cut the distance of the dinghy ride to some 100 meters. We used the dock again late at night to walk the dog.