[Public-List] Misery Cruise 2019.

[Gordon Laco]

Well it’s done.  

I hadn’t planned on this being the last trip of the year, but circumstances involving Thanksgiving with family and business travel have clapped a stopper on hopes for another trip in SURPRISE before haul-out.   On short notice Fred was able to shoot up here from St Catherines to join me for a quick three day excursion.  

Fred is the same guy who came last year - what a difference between that trip and this one.  We had the same strange east wind on Day One, but this time there was no rigging failure to dictate an unplanned return to port after a false start.

Fred is the same friend who was on the first Misery Trip in 1980… that year we sailed TOUCH WOOD, my Folkboat, from Toronto to Kingston down the length of Lake Ontario very late in the season.   We had the usual ’strange’ east wind (you’d think we’d have come to expect that) and we beat to windward for 52 hours to get there.  Once in Portsmouth Olympic Harbour, conveniently slap alongside the infamous Kingston Maximum Security Prison’s perimeter wall. we witnessed the phenomena of the east wind we’d been fighting die, letting the snapping flags go limp, then within an hour the normal west wind returned with fury, ensuring we’d be beating all the way home to Toronto.   That ordeal took three days and involved being nearly run down by a Russian freighter during a snow squall.  We had no lights due to TW’s batteries being drowned in the bilge.  The ship shone a spotlight on us as she passed close to windward… I have to say the worst part of that was the way the buzilian candlepower light showed us just how truly monstrous the waves were.    On the second morning we were off Port Hope, a small port partway home.  In the frigid pre-dawn we decided to break the voyage and put in… a patrolling police officer kindly shone his patrol car’s lights across the channel for us (we learned later he was a member of the Port Hope Yacht Club).  As we passed he shouted ‘what ever made you idiots go out this late in the year?’   My crew responded for us, pointing at me and shouting back ‘it’s his boat’, no doubt hoping to divert blame.     We pooled our cash and took a cab ride to a motel and booked a room… turned on the heat full blast and put the hot water on for showers.   Then we each lay on our beds and started discussing who was going to take the first hot shower….. and woke up the next day with the heat still blasting, and the room full of steam from the shower that was still going full on hot.   We went back to the boat, and discovered that during the night Eldorado Nuclear, whose plant then stood on the harbourside, had dumped some sort of sulphurous smelling acid into the harbour that etched a white ring on the British Seagull outboard’s stainless steel downtube (yikes).   Port Hope and Eldorado of course being infamous anyway for supplying the uranium for the Allies atomic bomb programs, including the pair of devices dropped on the Japanese in ’45.   

We eventually made it back to Toronto and put the boat away for the winter.   Well that was 38 years and 36 Misery Trips ago.

So back to the recent present.   Fred arrived Friday night and after a yarning session in front of the wood stove at my house, we turned in.  Early Saturday morning we were at the club were early haul out (for wimps) was in full swing and set off motoring into the east wind.  Once off Midland Point, we hoisted sail and took off galloping down Severn Sound, hung a left at Adams Point and shot to leeward running for the lower tip of Giant’s Tomb Island, cracking the usual joke that goes ‘gee, I wonder why it’s called that?’  The answer being of course because it looks exactly like there is a giant’s tomb on it…

In a matter of a few hours total passage time from the club, we were rounding up into the bay on the western side of Beckwith Island… normally the windward side but this time the leeward due to the east wind being forecast to blow for a few days.   Hook down in the good hard sand and well buried… naps, rum sipping, more story telling then steaks and corn one the cob on the BBQ.    We retreated to the cabin after the sunset and temperature drop… snug and warm with the wood stove going cheerily.

During the night, naturally, the wind went south west, which meant we began nodding with increasing vigour to the waves bending into our cove.  The chain growled and surged all night and at one point I wondered if I was starting to feel seasick in my berth up forward… but no, not that bad and went back to sleep after checking that we hadn’t moved by dragging.

Dawn.   Sumptuous breakfast of egg-in-the-hole with ham, coffee (ya, with a little rum in it) and we sorted ourselves out to get under way.   Away north toward Hope Island a jog, then gybed and rocketed broad reaching around the north side of Beckwith back toward the bottom tip of the Tomb.   As is my habit, I described to Fred how the Royal Engineers had plans to build a pair of Mortello Towers (google them if you’ve not seen one) like the ones at Kingston after the War of 1812 as outer defences on either side of the channel that being on the southern tip of the Tomb and the opposing Methodist Point in case of a resumption of invasion attempts… it never happened.    There is a green buoy down there guarding the Bennet Shoal mess, it’s one of those I swear gets moved around secretly because it’s hard to find sometimes.  Why not switch on the GPS, Fred offered… because I don’t want to, I replied and continued scanning for it with increasing concern…

Bingo, there it appeared right on the bow and we foamed around it and headed east toward Minnicognashene, guided by the highly visible light ranges on Brebeuf Island.   A quick gybe again, through the maze at Minnicog, then up past Hotchkiss Rocks, Ship Island, Sugar Island, down into Bone Island to that little cove that is one of my favorite anchorages in the Bay…  Hook down by mid afternoon.   Wonderful supper again (pork chops this time), more rum sipping and yarning, then back out into the cockpit to watch the International Space Station zip by right on schedule.    Heard something big crashing around in the forest in the dark… a bear?  Maybe.  But why was he making so much ruckus?  Well we had a wide moat around us in the form of the cove… best not think of ’The Boarding Bear of Heywood Island’ last year (google it)

That brings us to Monday morning.   We sailed out of the cove in very light air which turned into a cracking south westerly.  We beat in hard zigs and zags out of Bone and past the islands out to Minnicog; must have made 20+ tacks.    Fortunately we could lay the vey narrow exit and out we shot into the open, and found the course home was a joyous close reach slashing along at high speed in nice sized waves.   

Back in Midland we got a pump out, last one of the season, and chuckled that the fuel tanks were still full since we’d only run the engine about twenty minutes in the whole trip and that at the start leaving the club.

I guess that’s it for expeditions this year...


Gordon Laco
426 Surprise