Heywood Island July 5, 2016

There are 2 things I have not written about much, but we deal with them almost daily. The first is temperature. It has been cold here. Nights are in the 50's and days have been in the 60's, often feeling colder because of the wind over the water. Warmer days are promised thankfully. The sun is warm, so if the wind is light it can get pretty comfortable. It seems like the wind picks up every afternoon however.

The other thing is bugs. Lots of them. When we pulled into James Bay for example, Annie was welcomed by flies, horse flies and bees. Consequently we have left the screens in most of the time. It's a pain going in and out the doors with them in, but worth it. And somehow mosquitoes sneak in at night. So before turning in, we go on a hunt with our electronic flyswatter. It works great. The original one Carol Fletcher from AGMC gave us was the best. When you hit a bug with it there was a huge "crack" sound and the bug was disintegrated. Most satisfying! The one we have now fries them OK, but we miss the crack. And this morning we had another batch of May flies, but much less than before.

The granite rocks on the hills almost appear as snow.

I wrote the two preceding paragraphs this morning. I guess I should have whined earlier because today has been beautiful and nicely warm. It's evening now and we are docked in one of the Orro's favorite anchorages, Heywood Island. It's 11.9 NM from Killarney. We left at 11;00 and arrived at 1:15, with an average speed of a bit less than 6 knots. Annie followed Brillig as we navigated through the Lansdowne Channel. It was a very pleasant cruise. One of my depth sounders stopped working. Fortunately I have two. This happened once before but it started working again.

Peter led us into a little cove which so far has stayed private for just the two of us. There are a lot of boats anchored in this harbor, but it is quite large so this is no problem. The light blue areas are where it is safe to anchor, and the boat shows Annie's location.

View of the entrance from inside the harbor.

I took a couple of minutes to put one more coat of varnish on my step, and also on the foot rest under our seats. I think the step project is finished, and successful. Of course Kerry can always find ways to expand the scope of this project. We have decided to stay here two days so tomorrow I will do some gelcoat patching. Kerry and I went on a kayak trip after the varnishing was done. Peter has offered us the use of his dingy so I think tomorrow we will take a trip through the anchorage.

The Orro's are coming to Annie for dinner. I am grilling a steak while Peter has a pork chop to cook. Marianna rarely eats meat. We gave Peter a bag of potato chips this morning after noticing that he loved them at last night's dinner. He said he bought a bag in Kincardine and ate the whole thing himself in one day!

We received word today that the Great Lakes Cruising Club accepted our Harbor Report for James Bay and will be adding it to their web site in the coming days. Yea us!