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!