In my desperate struggle to attempt to catch up with my blog posts for the last few months I bring to you the story of the Canadian Captain Jack Sparrow. Please note that I put the date of this post to coincide as close as possible with the actual event. So hence why this looks like new content from the past. Cuz… Well… it is. Sorta.

Anyways on to the story:

After all the fun J and I had with Pathfinder’s hole in the hull, insurance fun as a result of said hole, and extreme fears that we may need to sell Pathfinder if the water levels in Lake Ontario don’t recover from their extremely low levels are nerves were rather raw. So after a nice long Christmas Holiday up at my parents we weren’t really expecting any surprises aside from a slightly cold boat to go home to and perhaps some rough weather ahead of us making the marina a bit more choppy than we like (some waves are fine… a marina that could double as a dishwasher is not). On our way back though we had some… issues. A severe storm had rolled on in from the north and was turning the entire highway 400 southbound into a skating rink making driving really dangerous for a lot of the way until we reached a traffic jam. The traffic jam wasn’t caused by car accidents (amazingly) but from the police setting up a road block to stop people from driving on an even WORSE part of the highway.

Immediately when we realized that this was the case to our left an car took out another car by rear ending it!

A split second later an SUV decided to take on the guard rail to our right. The guard rail however said “COME AT ME BRO!” and won in the struggle that ensued.

All drivers involved were fine and police were there immediately so we continued on our icy trek back to Toronto.

After getting thoroughly lost thanks to their weird detour signs we got a phone call from the Marine Police Unit in Toronto and the exchange went something like this:

“Hello is this the owner of Pathfinder?”
“Y-yes? Is it ok? DID IT SINK!?”
“… No it’s fine. There was a bit of an incident though involving your boat though so could you meet with us so we can tell you what happened?”
“Ok. Sure. WHEW. Is everything ok there though? It didn’t sink did it?”
“No no no… Everything is fine. Just show up when you can.”

We were pulled over then (as ALL people with cellphones should do… Honestly people if someone is calling you we can all hear your car noises. It’s not easy to understand anyone while they’re driving… Sheesh. Take 5 minutes and pull over onto the shoulder) and you can imagine the sort of head rush I had with a call from the police about our poor Pathfinder at this point. The roads were still a bit icy but once we got to the inner city roads we made our way down as fast as possible.

Sadly I don’t have any photo’s to share of what we saw when we got there but I’ll describe as best I can.

I got out of the car right beside the boat (it’s easier to unpack when the car is that close) and noticed that something didn’t look quite right at all. The boat was at least a yard and a bit away from the wall we tie up to during winter. I realized then that with this strong wind from the east we the ship was being blown away from the wall rather strongly (Yes I said from the north before but in Toronto the wind gets twisted around quite a bit with the buildings). Worse yet our usual collection of up to 6 lines we have (including to lines that are over 1 1/2″ thick) that we use to tie ourselves up only 2 were still tied there. If the lines snapped we’d cruise merrily sideways through the marina and crush the other boats potentially! Given how late it was at that time there was a good chance that no one would notice the large steel vessel sneaking up on them in the howling wind either.

So I made the leap over and had to find what happened to our lines. They were all over the ship it weird piles so I grabbed a few of them and toss the ends to J so she could throw them over the bollards on the wall and I could slowly cinch the ship closer to shore. Once that was done we got to unloading the car but we also noticed that our Christmas Wreath had been thrown over the little crane at the bow of the boat. Our summer stairs were positioned beside the hatch on the starboard side of the pilot house whereas a barrel we had on board was maneuvered beside the port side pilot house hatch. Also… our dingy for some weird reason was on the docks across the marina from us.

On top of all this mystery when we were about to go out and take the car back to it’s permanent parking a security guard from the Harbour Front Center asked us if we saw who it was that had done all this and if the person had green hair.

What the hell happened while we were gone?

When we got to the police station they filled us in on what had happened in total and over the course of a few days a few more details were filled in from various people that had helped out at the marina while we were gone. I’ll present this in chronological order as far as we know instead of how we had it which was in small snippets from people.

2 Days Prior:

The culprit (a rather scary lady with green hair) had been seen lurking around the Harbour Front Center a few days prior. She’s homeless and slightly mentally unstable from all accounts.

1 Day Prior:

The day before the incident involving Pathfinder she had attempted to set fire to the ice of an ice rink nearby our boat. The security guards chased her off but later on that night she came back, found the road salt and poured it in a huge X across the rink melting it right down to the concrete.

Day of the incident:

The day of the incident she was climbing all over our boat throwing stuff all over the place. Our neighbors couldn’t quite make out who the person was but assumed it must be me from distance… Just with green hair… and acting weird… Ok. That part isn’t unusual for me but there ya go.

They saw her banging on the pilot house hatches and shouted out “Josh? Is that you?”

In a high pitched voice she replied “Nope! I’m ok!”

They then asked (thinking I was VERY strange at this point) “Do you need a hand?”

Her awesome reply was “No thanks! I have 2!” and continued to attempt to open the hatches.

Apparently after not getting in (Thank goodness she didn’t just try to smash some of the windows) she decided it would be a good time to try to untie the boat from the wall entirely. Fortunately 1 of our cables was thoroughly frozen solid by this point so the boat wasn’t going to go anywhere too far unless it simply snapped. Getting frustrated at this point she decided to try to steal the little inflatable boat we have (It was still in the water at this point since we had yet to have any ice in the marina at this point). She got in and broke both of the oar locks (1 only a bit. The other needs to be completely replaced), lost an oar, and started to paddle out of the marina.

Fortunately she didn’t get far before someone in the marina stopped her. She had no life jacket on and the weather was getting very bad very quickly so she would most likely be flipped into the lake and freeze to death if they hadn’t stopped her. The way they did that was by convincing her to come over to the dock for a moment and just continuously talk to her. It was there that they asked what she was doing with the dingy. Her albeit honest/creative reply was that she was stealing it so she could get to her other ship The Empire Sandy (a large 3 masted sailing vessel at Toronto most notably not owned by a homeless lady with green hair). They managed to keep her on the dock by making up the story that the gate to the dock they were on was broken and someone was off getting a lock smith to fix it. In reality they were running off to the police to get them to take care of her.

She was then arrested under the mental health act and taken to a hospital where they could treat her.

At this point people would think that this is the end of the story. But it isn’t. In Ontario you can only apparently be held for 2 to 3 days under the Mental Health Act before being released. So…

2 Days After The Incident:

One of the marina guys noticed that someone with green hair had stolen a ladder and was trying to use it to climb over the gate to the dock to where my dingy was still floating (I figured I’d leave it there for now to dissuade anyone else from trying to go on a Shackleton-esque voyage). The guy threatened to call the police (again) and she ran off.

Epilogue:

When all things were said and done we were out 1 paddle, and had a bit of damage to the dingy. We asked the police if there was anything we could do on that front to get some compensation. I didn’t figure there was anyway to get some but hey, might as well ask. They informed me that given that she was well known by the police for having mental issues and being permanently homeless in the area that literally there was nothing to do.

Now… As to why I called this post “Captain Jack Sparrow?”… Well when we pieced together the entire story it reminded me of an article from The Sun I had read about a drunk lady that tried to steal a ferry in Britain. http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4548061/Woman-stole-passenger-ferry-after-drug-and-drinks-bender.html Short version she was on drugs and booze and decided she was the infamous Captain Jack Sparrow destined for adventure on the high seas! I figure that our green haired Captain was planning a similar voyage. Where would she have gone? Who knows! But it could’ve been interesting if she had succeeded.

One more Jack Sparrow link for everyone: http://youtu.be/GI6CfKcMhjY

Here’s the final installment of Hurricane Sandy… And in true Josh style it’s several months late.

First a quick confession. I had debated about not posting this as we were very close to possibly giving up and selling the boat out right after all the issues we had over winter which is why this blog hasn’t been updated recently. Part of it was to hide what damage had been found in case this would dissuade potential buyers. But after all the repairs were done and some other stuff that had gone on we decided to keep Pathfinder and continue our life on the moderately high seas.

Ok. Enough soul baring onto the Dry Dock.

When we finally were able to get going to the dry dock my Dad took the helm and I was on bilge watch duty (this is primarily because my arms are skinnier and I’m a bit more flexible than my Dad so if something happened to the plug when we were pulling out I could fix it a bit quicker in an emergency). Getting out proved to be more tricky than initially anticipated as we were extremely hard aground and backing up required several minutes over going at 1/4 power in reverse to blow out ground below us. Eventually though we managed to slowly pull backwards and into deeper water. The cruise over to the dry dock was uneventful if a bit stressful as I was running around checking for leaks etc.

Once we got to the dry dock area they weren’t quite ready for us so Dad docked us in a single smooth move into the wall just in front of dry dock ship. Honestly his docking skills are seriously mad at times. An hour or so later we met with the dry dock workers and they started to flood the old ship that they use as their floating dry dock and shortly after we were hauled into place and the dry dock started to pump itself… well… dry.

One of the Toronto Ferries was being worked on when we got to the dry dock. Here it is pulling out.

This is us in the dry dock while it’s being pumped out. The door in front folds down to let boats in and out.

Someone with a sense of humor had painted this on one of the walls. Rather appropriate for us.

The dry dock takes about an hour or so to fully pump out but afterwards we (naturally) took a variety of photos… And ya. Pathfinder is a LOT bigger once she’s out of the water.

Bow on.

The beams on the side are used to hold the ship upright while on the supports on the bottom.

The stern. The large gray blocks stood just over hip high just to give some perspective.

I heard you liked ships. So I put a ship in your ship so you can boat while you boat.

 

After the guys hydro blasted the bottom they got to work on the hull doing a survey and checking for any other weak spots. The welded over the patch and a few days later we were ready to launch.

The holes that caused us to leak in the first place. The big one was about the size of a twoonie.

So with the hole patched over they started to flood the dry dock again… When disaster struck! Another hole appeared! They quickly pumped out what had already filled in the dry dock and we were back on the hard.

What had happened?

Well a few things.

1. Because a boat is meant to be floating on water and not sitting on land the hull flexed a bit making and other weak point weaker.
2. Since when I picked up the boat it had been left in the ocean almost unattended for a few years the bilge in the cargo-hold had been partially filled with sea water which at the steel from the inside out

So with both those items we were forced to do a very thorough hull examination (even more so than what is typically done) and another 7 holes in were found bringing the total to 9. Given the history it was decided to simply ensure that the entire area was safe and 2 new steel plates were welded on for the entire length of the cargohold (and then some) to form 2 new garboard strakes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strake) which are essentially the plates of steel on either side of the keel. This took several more days naturally since it went from welding a piece of steel the same size as a small paperback book in place to 2 sheets of steel over 2 feet wide and 20 feet long into place.

WHILE this is going on (cuz of course we’re not really done yet) we were supposed to be going into our winter slip. Fortunately the ship that goes in after us (Kajama) to seal us in for winter was very understanding as they had gone through the same sort of ordeal before. And the ship that goes in after him to seal him in (Empire Sandy) is owned by the owner and operator of the Toronto Dry Docks. Luck was on our side for timing all through this along with the patience and cooperation of the Harbour Front Center staff.

After all this work (totaling $18,000… ouch) we were launched and able to head to our winter slip. My Dad brought one of his friends, Chris, with us to help with the lines (sorry I can’t remember your name!) (Update: Got the name. Sorry for gaping on it. I’m really bad with remembering names), Dad was at the helm, and I was panicking in the bilge to make sure that there were no leaks. Which there wasn’t!

Fully repaired and not sinking anymore we slipped into our slip for Winter and buckled down to face off against mother nature again.

HUGE thanks to

• Everyone at the Toronto Dry Docks (http://www.torontodrydock.com/) you guys are a nutty bunch and do frankly awesome work
• Craig at the Harbour Front Center for helping keep everyone organized and informed with what was going on with our poor ship
• The captain of the Kajama for understanding our situation
• My parents and sister for being there when the days got particularly dark

And finally my wife Jeannie! They say your first year of marriage is the most difficult. I had always assumed that that meant just personality clashes and leaving the toilet seat up. But since we’re us NATURALLY it’d be something else entirely.

Here’s a few other photo’s of the underside of the ship and the dry dock itself.

Along the bottom of our hull.

The great Canadian Barnacles… Otherwise known as Zebra Muscles. Our anti-fowling paint seems to be holding up rather well.

A view of our propeller, rudder, and the unique cage design around our propeller to protect it from lobster traps.

My Dad using his hand as a size gauge beside the propeller itself. His hand was just barely larger than the nut that holds the propeller onto our shaft.

This door was in the bottom of the dry dock and is water tight. The reason for the door is that behind there they have their entire shop so it’s easier to get to working on the bottom of the hull.

The beams used to hold our ship upright have to be levered into and out of position manually. Here’s on the workers wrestling with it.

Pathfinder underway to our winter docking.

So as Sandy has finally passed us and we’ve managed to weather it relatively fine in comparison to other locations I finally have a few minutes to write an update as to what happened to us during the storm.

First I’ll tell you what our plan basically was for the storm.

1. Batten down the hatches
2. Weather the worst of it
3. Go for a stroll once it passes and check out what happened to the rest of the Toronto Islands

Hurricane Sandy however had other plans.

We have been very hard aground for quite a while at the marina. Lake levels have been incredibly low this year. Not so shallow that we can’t get ourselves out but it is at a concerning level (Side note: We’re right now at the low point of the lake cycle so with any luck next year will be more regular). This is nothing to totally worry about on a normal year with normal weather.

The Hurricane brought with it extreme pressure changes and waves even in our protected marina (the waves had white caps in some of the basins because of the wind for instance). The Lakes aren’t affected by tides but what we do get is that big storms push large amounts of water around the lakes giving us something similar. Typically this is a gentle process but not under these circumstances. As a result we went from hard aground to floating (something we hadn’t been doing for near a month at this point) in very short time spans. Combine that with the waves and we started pounding on the bottom.

The Toronto Islands are mostly made up of landfill and sand. So buried below the soft sandy soil could be anything including concrete, steel, heck anything that is hard and ungiving basically. The pounding on the bottom essentially punched a hole in the bottom and a leak formed.

J and I were mostly in the galley keeping an eye on how things progressed outside and trying to keep our cats calm. Cosmo (our black cat) frankly didn’t give a crap what was going on and was lounging upstairs with us. Martini (our tabby cat) started acting odd. Normally he’s a rather skittish cat that doesn’t particularly like being held too closely. But he was running up to us and jumping in our laps. Stay for a bit. Jump off. Then run to the stairs. He did this over and over until J decided to follow him to the top of the stairs in the cargo hold. I was on the phone with my parents when she suddenly yelled for me to come on downstairs and that there was a problem.

What we found was that there was nearly a foot of water above the tile flooring in the cargo hold and rising. We do have bilge pumps available but they are 110volt pumps and we don’t have them plugged in, we also didn’t have any high water alarms installed either. This I know is a grievous error and not a good idea in any boat and I can only blame myself for not having such systems in place earlier (the 12volt pumps that were already in there from before have never worked).

J and I quickly jumped into action and threw in all out pumps that we had into the bilge of the cargo hold to try to make headway on the water before we try to totally identify where the leak was coming from. 1 pump was starting to slowly make headway but I threw in a second anyways just to make it go down faster. Once we started making headway I was able to take some photos.

This trip I wanted to basically man the wheel the entire way over but the fates conspired against me. I ended up getting the stomach flu only a few days before this move and even on this day I was still hurling over the rail. Fortunately my friend Mitch (who’s got loads and loads of experience with ships) was on hand to do that while I just ran around with my parents and some friends on board to man the lines (while I also manned the rail). The trip went smoothly and this year and our dock was there waiting for us.

View April 20th 2012 in a larger map

This year is we’re going to have a lot of changes on board structurally as we’re doing a lot of finishing work inside via either contractors or our own muscle. More on that to come throughout the year.

I hope to take Pathfinder out more often this year after some crucial work done on the ship itself (running lights, rudder indicator, radio etc). We’re also planning a trip State side to fuel up as well as it’ll cost us maybe $200 in fuel to get there and back but we’ll save at least $1000 in fuel. Plus it’ll be a fun trip!

Hey all. So a number of things have gone on.

1. We moved the boat! We’re back at Pier 4 for winter again.
2. I piloted the ship out of TIM (thanks to Mitch giving me guidance on how to handle the ship) so now I’m no longer called “Swabby” by Dad.
3. The best news is that on Halloween I asked Jeannie to marry me and she said yes.

View Saturday October 29 2011 in a larger map

The sun sets on Pathfinder once again after a spectacular series of long overdue nice days. True they’ve been hot, but it hasn’t rained, no drops in temperature and overall the evenings have proven to be quite pleasant. In any case I find myself relaxing after driving back from my parents house this weekend on the front deck looking at the full, yet quiet, B Basin of Toronto Island Marina with the CN Tower to my left lit up by the setting sun. Life couldn’t get much better than this really.

The summer has so far been a rather busy time for me with work and the boat but mostly work taking up a large amount of time. Again I find that refitting a vessel while living on it while still working is, if anything, a test of patience and extremely flexible on board project deadlines. Many of you know that I’m still wrestling with the plumbing for the boat with special focus on getting our head (toilet) done. Everyone seems to marvel at how long we’ve lasted without one on board but honestly after having essentially lived a life style more akin to camping than in a (floating) condo Jeannie and I have (miraculously) gotten used to it. Every day I work on Pathfinder gets us closer and closer to being a fully fitted out live aboard vessel, but with every step forward one tends to run into “surprises” along the way forcing one to either rethink, redo, or rip out something on board. This isn’t due to a lack of planning mind you as I’ve found one of the best ways to shorten project times is to literally think about how to do stuff on board for days and even weeks before actually starting on it. I know this sounds like me being incredibly lazy but I’ll guarantee you that this sort of project requires careful planning above and beyond what normal house renovations require. Here’s an example:

Behind where our toilet will go I have to build a rectangular box to house the sewage hose, water pipe, and electronic system for the toilet. One would assume this would be a straight forward series of 12 pieces of wood (roughly) that is split into 3 different sizes to make a proper box (4 for width, 4 for height, 4 for depth). Well no. Since this is a) a boat and b) an old boat things have warped and shifted into odd angles and what not. One cannot even use something as basic as a level since the boat rocks with the waves and also tends to list (lean) to one side. As a result every piece is a different size yet it is now perfectly square to the floor and to every other piece. Weird eh?

Regardless of all these hang ups we now have both side of the galley completely done cabinet wise (counter top, water, electricity, lighting are still in the works), we have a window AC unit installed (inside the pilot house it can easily hit 30 degrees without the blinds closed and the AC off like we had for the past 2 days while we were gone), ventilation for the cargo hold retro fitted into the cargo hold hatch done, and part of the starboard side repainted with black paint to cover the rust and scuffs from it’s 5 years of neglect in the ocean (Thanks Jeannie!).

So as one can see things are progressing, but life throws things in the way which one needs to take care of.

In the Marina itself our little community expands and contracts depending on the sort of events going on on or around the island and the weather (psch… These fair weather boaters I tell ya). The tour boats still fly on by putting us on display and mentioning Pathfinder prominently, however incorrectly, in their tour speeches. The wild life knows which ships to harass for bread, and we still end up giving tours almost weekly to people who have dreams of working and living on a boat such as ours. But for now I shall sign off calling it a night on my little 65′ slice of cottage life heaven in down town TO before starting the work week anew.

34 degrees Celsius? Honestly? For Pete’s sake this weather is not being kind.

Fortunately we have 1 weapon available for the time being… The lake. It’s still cold water in there so the cargohold stays at a much cooler temp than the pilot house etc which does get very hot. Next week I’ll be dragging the in window AC unit down to put into one of our windows in said pilot house. Cool air should fall from there into the lower areas eventually much more easily than the issue we had in winter where hot air apparently decided to not rise from the cargo holds fire place.

We also install the other 1/2 of the cabinets in the galley and I have a few pictures of that. Just haven’t had a moment to upload them given how busy work has been. sigh

As cheesy as this sounds it really felt like a home coming when we got back to TIM this past Friday. Before we get to far into it here’s the path we took:

View Pier 4 to TIM April 2011 in a larger map

Originally we had planned to make this trip a lot bigger by going out the Western gap then coming in through the Eastern gap and coming into TIM. We didn’t do this for a number of reasons.

1. During winter we used quite a bit of fuel for heating with the Webasto. Near the end we had sorted out the system a bit more thus we got it to use less but still that ate through a quite a lot of fuel.
2. We couldn’t get a fuel truck in to give us more fuel. This was rather ridiculous overall. We wanted 1500L of undyed diesel delivered to us for heating and general fuel (The Webasto is a fuel oil system and fuel oil is just dyed diesel. Legally we can’t run dyed diesel in the boat since we can use it for moving the ship around and undyed diesel is taxed in a particular way for non-commercial transportation…. It’s a bit confusing but whatever)
3. Timing. Basically since the fuel issue was around we could do the trip in a short while and get ourselves safely across, have a drink or 2, and call it a day for Easter weekend. If we had stayed around longer the day would get a bit longer for the entire crew and we’d all get home late.

Overall the entire trip went fairly well with only the typical issues associated with manually dragging a large ship with the wind blowing it into the marina through a narrow channel. Lots of rope and some elbow grease and we were able to pull Pathfinder through the bridge and passed one of the docks that was pointing into the channel a bit. The engine then started up alright and we headed on off across the harbour to the Islands (A trip of 2km roughly). Things were going well until we were just shy of the 1/2 way point when the engine started to conk out the way an engine does when it has no fuel. A number of questions raced through my head really quickly.

Had my last fuel sounding been off drastically?

Did we really not have 600L’s in fuel left?

Were we going to be in serious trouble and get blown into the airport before we got rescued?!

Turns out none of those. Apparently right before winter we shutoff the fuel lines to the engine just to stop any fuel leaks we might have. So ya. Whoops! This just reinforces that I need to get a sensor array working in the engine rooms so we have a ships status screen of some sorts.

The other issue that we had was the weather. It was gorgeous no doubt but when I had woken up that day it was perfectly calm with NO wind at all. By the time we were ready to set off (around 11:45) the wind had picked up and was starting to blow the ship sideways (Ships such as Pathfinder have no sails and don’t use wind as a mode of transportation BUT since we have a super structure [The house like section above the hull part of the boat] we have a lot of something called “freeboard” which is the amount of surface area of the ship above the water. THIS acts like a sail and since Pathfinder has a LOT of weight it takes a lot of pulling to stop it from drifting away since the wind was blowing us west into the middle of the marina.). By the time we got to the Deep Pike Cut, where we have to keep an eye out for a hidden sand bar that depending on the water depth, we couldn’t see through the waves since it was a bit choppy. Regardless we made it through with no issues and managed to get to our dock with no incident… minus our dock have 2 ships on it temporarily which got out of our way REALLY quickly.

Once tied up it was like a really nice home coming. Saw a lot of faces I recognized and they recognized our crew back which was nice. So now everything is as it should be. Back at the island where it’s nice and quiet, the cottage country in the middle of down town Toronto.

Big thanks to Niel, Sandy and John Cameron along with Marjorie. Also thanks to Shane from Pier 4 for helping with the ropes. Naturally a HUGE thanks to my Dad for piloting us across (something I hope to learn how to do properly this year)!

Jeannie and I have just completed on the Pathfinder at Pier 4 (more or less). Things have been going rather well even if the ship isn’t 100% complete. We now have most of the equipment ready to be installed but we’re still working on wood work. Today I hope to get the galley paneled and with Dad’s help get some electrical run. Although that sounds like a rather large amount of work Dad and I have decided that if we don’t get to it, then we don’t get to it. This week is our week of recovery since the mad rush we did the end of last week (where we did the majority of the wood work, finished 90% of the insulation and vapor barrier installation, and brought Pathfinder across to Pier 4.

Wow. You can really tell this is an early morning post. I’m just meandering all over the place with topics. Whew. Ok. I need coffee…

Back to how it was on board Pathfinder. Most of the time the temperature right now hovers around 20 degrees Celsius in the pilot house which has become our temporary master bedroom until the wood work in the cargo hold is done (right now it’s acting as wood storage and my workshop). The bathroom right now is by far the most insulated place in the entire boat… considering it’s holding onto all the last batons of insulation ready for installation when we have the rest of the framing up for the cargo hold. The galley right now has a picnic table in it along with some of the rest of our miscellaneous gear and kitchen utensils. We hope to have this mostly sorted out say end of next week but we probably won’t drop the mattress down to the cargo hold until the week after some time since next weekend we’re getting our HUGE Wabasto heater for the boat. This new heater will be total overkill for our purposes and is a bit pricey… But at this point a bit of overkill on heat for the coming winter is a good thing

Aside from the mess and general disorganized nature we’re living in, Jeannie and I are happy. We have our own space!

So Pathfinder made its final journey for the year from Toronto Island Marina to Pier 4 this year. Naturally since this is one of my stories things didn’t exactly go as planned as you can see by the map below of approximately where we went.

View From TIM to Pier 4 in a larger map

First was the break out from TIM that was a bit fun but not overly scary. As some of you know we were hard aground. Thinking back on it we may have been as much as 18 inches into the mud at times so a good portion of our propeller was buried… Mind you with a 40 inch prop that really amounted to a hill of beans really.

We cast off the lines… no movement.
Dad started the engine at low… no movement.
We throttled up higher… no movement.
We maxed it out… It slowly pulled itself backwards into the deeper waters of the middle of the marina. Marginally deeper that is. We were still dragging bottom but only a bit. We had a piling post put in for us for next years dockage which was in our way for turning out (our ship has a huge turning radius) so some of the TIM dock hands help push us around so we could get out easier and then we were off to brave the Deep Channel pass.

“Why ‘brave’ Josh? It’s a deep channel! No problems there right?”

Yaaaa. About that. It’s deep in places but that channel has had freak sand bars pop up with the crazy weather systems pushing the water around. Regardless though we did get out without hitting bottom and kept a decent amount of space beneath us most of the way. Part of the issue is that we don’t have a working depth sounder so we never really know how much water is beneath us at any given point so it’s all done by eye balling the depth (correction: we HAVE a depth sounder… it just doesn’t work well if it works at all). Once we got to the buoys outside of the channel we were in the deep water of the Toronto Harbour area.

There I called up Pier 4 to ask if we had permission to slide right on in since I knew that there was 1 guy that “needed” to get in before us. A bit of back story on that and why we didn’t go into the slip on Friday like we had originally planned because the other vessel needed the space around us to get into his slip for winter (the channel into the marina is just shy of 30 feet across and Pathfinder is a whole 18 feet wide so it makes it a bit tight for anyone to maneuver). That timing worked out well for us anyways so we had no issues. We decided to try maybe for Saturday then… The guy had to reschedule his entry date again due to engine problems. So we said we’d be in early Monday morning… Annnnnnnnnnd so did he. But that he’d be at latest noon… Mind you we got a lot of work done Saturday and Sunday so having a Monday departure was ok. Just the time was getting late especially with me having to work on Monday as well. We call up Pier 4 and the other vessel still isn’t there because he’s getting a pump out across at RCYC. So we end up taking a toddle around the harbour area completing 1 loop.

During this Pier 4 calls again and informs me that they’re STILL not there and that it may be a bit later. So we decided to do yet another loop of the harbour as you can see. At one point we thought we saw the other vessel and did a bit of zig zagging to let him get in front of us so we could just follow him right on in. But when he got closer to Pier 4 he veered to the west and headed for the western gap. Just then Pier 4 called again and said he wasn’t there yet so I called to Dad at helm that we couldn’t come in yet, but Pier 4 interrupted and said to just come in now since it was after noon anyways and the other boat would just have to shuffle in around us. So with some maneuvering we slid right on into our new home at Pier 4 on the western wall just passed the white draw bridge.

Thanks to all that helped out with the journey!
Mom, Dad, my number one gal (you know who you are), Skipper Cheryl, and Mitch!