Mast Down

Sorel Quebec
N 46 02.894 W 73 06.385

I have a confession to make. Several days ago we decided to alter our grand plan and to go down to Lake Champlain instead of continuing on through Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. My confession is that I didn't blog that information right away. We're not like those crazy teens on Myspace.com we post a lot of information publicly on this blog but not everything, duh.

So why did we change? I can't nail down any single factor. It was a combination. We are late in the season for the longer route. The weather has been so calm that it's bound to turn adversely soon. The Gulf of Saint Lawrence coast has sheer cliffs, few or no anchorages and the weather can be fierce. I would feel safer in those circumstances with a third crewman on board. Also, we might have had to put in to a marina almost every night for the next month or so and that would be expensive.
In addition, we did get homesick seeing Lyon Mountain and hearing Burlington radio stations. Lake Champlain has always been our first love for a nice place to sail. It was all those things.

We got to Sorel and only one of the two marinas has a crane for mast stepping. We were surprised and a little taken aback though to learn that the crane was self service and the mast stepping is do it yourself. What the heck though, it's time we learned to do it. Now at sunset, I can report that the mast unstepping went very well. We did it ourselves with no big incident and only a little help from Lauren and Karen, friendly passers by. The only casualty was a broken Windex. Heck, that's not
bad. On my previous boats I used to break at least one Windex per year in mast stepping/unstepping operations. As a bonus, I learned that the fee for use of the crane was only $45 as compared to the $150 we paid to have it done for us a the Hop-O-Nose Marina in Catskill, and $140 at Oswego.

Our joy at saving money was short lived. I asked Libby to pass the camera ashore so I could take a picture of Tarwathie with the mast down. You guessed it. We fumbled the camera when handing it off and ker-splash it went in to the water. Damn, that camera was less than 2 months old.

Oh well, all in all we did a pretty good job today. We rewarded ourselves with a dinner at a sidewalk cafe (what else?) in Sorel. We delighted in watching the people and the cars and the way that they cruise the streets at night like I remember seeing in Sweden in the 1970s and like the movie, American Graffiti from 50 years ago. I confess to ogling the Quebec girls. They sure do have a lot of strikingly beautiful young girls in Quebec. They always did. What's more, they are fond of skimpy
very revealing outfits. I'm fond of them too. It would be worth billions to learn what they put in the baby food here in Quebec. When I was in college, the Clarkson boys headed to Montreal for weekends in search of girls. They reported that the girls didn't like the local Quebec boys so the American's did well. Myself? I was engaged to Libby all those college years so I couldn't go.

Tomorrow we head south on the Richelieu Canal and by Friday we should be on Lake Champlain once again.

Attention friends and family! There should be opportunities to sail with us on Lake Champlain in the next two weeks. Please don't be shy. Call us if you would like to go.

In addition, we'll also have a second visit to the Albany and Scotia areas in late August. We hope to see more friends there. This time I'd like to arrange a tour of the new NYISO building in Rensselaer.