Lake Ontario to Kingston

Lake Ontario to Kingston:  Today started early with the two captains comparing notes on the best course to set to cross Lake Ontario and how to make Canada charts work on my captain's laptop.  Before crossing we thought we'd try to get some Canadian dollars in an Oswego bank.  Unfortunately that just turned out to be good exercise walking up into town only to find out that they need 24 hours notice to get Canadian money on hand.  Hmmmm - we didn't even have 24 minutes that we wanted to spend on this task, so we left empty handed, walked back to the docks, pulled in our lines, and headed for the border. 

The crossing of Lake Ontario was uneventful with the water as smooth as glass to start the trip across.  That only goes to show that when "2 foot seas" are predicted, you never know what you might find.  Anyway, as we got midway across the lake, the captain figured out that the speaker on our VHF radio had died. He could use the mic as he tried the hailer (public address type system), and that worked just fine, so it was just the speaker in issue.  Since we were crossing with our new-found friends, it would be nice to be able to communicate with them or any other vessel on the water for that matter.  Fortunately,k we do have both an upper and a lower station and only the upper station had failed.  So for part of the trip I was sent down below to monitor the radio to see if anyone tried to hail us.  In fact our friends did hail us, so I went up and took the wheel and sent the captain down to talk.  yet another inconvenient but not catastrophic failure to add to our growing list of issues.

We arrived in Kingston, Ontario somewhere between 2:00 and 3:00 Eastern Time.  We had dutifully put up our Q (yellow) flag for Quarantine which is required until we have passed customs.  Who only knows what we might have brought over the border!? The captain is the only person who is allowed to leave the vessel until we are authorized to be in the country, so I stayed behind and did a little of this and a little of that to stay busy until I could disembark. 

As soon as he got back from customs and checking us into the marina, the captain wanted to see what needed to be done to address the speaker problem.  After investigating the situation, the captain expected to be going to either West Marine or to Radio Shack to see if he could get a part that would help him put in a temporary fix.  We have speakers on the fly bridge for our radio; he decided that he could wire the VHF radio to one of those speakers as a means of hearing whatever is being transmitted.  We lifted up the control panel, and he climbed underneath.  After a few ah-ha's and um-hmm's, he came out and went to his supply cabinet in the boat, came back up did some tinkering, and asked me to turn on the VHF.  Amazingly, or not so amazing if you know my captain, the radio worked as he had suggested, i.e. any transmissions made are now audible via the radio speaker.  He said that it was actually just as fast to fix the problem as it was to diagnose it, and the best part is that we didn't have to go visit Radio Shack to fix it. 

The only activity I really wanted to do today was go to the farmer's market.  Unfortunately by the time we were done messing around with docking, checking in with customs, and investigating the speaker problem for the VHF, it was almost 5:30 by the time I got up to town and 95% of the market had packed up and left.  I managed to buy 6 zucchini to bring "home" to cook up for dinner one of these days.  They were already packed up and on the truck but the guy pulled them out for me.  I was very happy with my booty.

From the farmer's market we continued into town to see what we could do about getting some money in local currency.  We were told that the place to go is the local general store aka convenience store. The captain inserted his ATM card in the slot, and the machine "ate" it.  We called the 800 number on the ATM machine and the owning bank had the tech crew reboot the teller machine.  The customer service agent I talked to said that after reboot the card would spit back out or we were out of luck.  We waited with baited breath for the 15 minutes it took for the machine to reboot and voila - nothing.  We ended up calling our bank and having them block the card from future use, so we are now one card down and afraid to try any more ATM machines.  We don't hold many credit / debit cards so to "lose" one is a big hit to our ability to spend money. 

Since we were unwilling to stick another card in another ATM machine and since the banks were closed, we find ourselves having spent multiple hours in multiple cities attempting to fill our wallets but still without sufficient cash-on-hand.  Well tomorrow is as they say "another day".  We'll have to get ourselves up to town and to the currency exchange or bank tomorrow to get this job done once and for all. 

Although we had both lost our appetites following the ATM mishap, we decided to wander around Kingston in search of dinner.  Since Rideau Canal looks rather desolate from the literature, I think I'll be doing quite a bit of cooking on board after this, so I figured I would request one more restaurant meal before going into camping mode.  We found a pub that sounded like it had food we would enjoy.  I love hamburgers so I ordered that and the captain likes lamb so he chose that menu option.  My hamburger didn't taste like an American hamburger meaning a USA hamburger.  It tasted more like meatloaf as best I can describe it but with some weird spice that didn't sit well with me later as it kept repeating itself over and over through the evening.  The captain said his lamb didn't taste like lamb to him.  I know they added breading and spices to the hamburger, but I don't know what they did to the lamb.  

After dinner we rushed to a local hotel where we had seen advertised earlier the 'Walking Tour of Haunted Kingston'.  The tickets were $13 each for 1.5 hours walking tour of supposedly haunted places in Kingston.  I find ghosts, etc to be an interesting subject and I love to walk, so what better activity for me.  The captain is not much on ghosts as he is a non-believer, but he agreed that we could go on the walk.  The stories werre a mix of some haunting episodes and some macabre stories of Kingston's past.  Even a non-believer in ghosts can get something out of the history of the city as they explained about unmarked grave sites for nuns in one place and stories of hangings at an old jail house in another.  The captain took lots of pictures of old houses as we walked the streets - probably a lot more than necessary.  I guess I'll find out when I transfer the pix to my laptop.

When we arrived so late in Kingston and I didn't think I would get to see anything, I asked the captain about staying here an extra day.  Besides market day (only on Tuesday - not on Wednesday),  I had Fort Henry on the list of places I thought would be interesting to visit.  However, after today's events, I am actually ready to move on in the morning to a new venue.  We are not museum people, nor are we tour-the-city-by-bus people, and we certainly didn't want to go on the 'cruise around the city' (enough boats already). 

I like to get away where it is peaceful and be mellow on vacation, so we're going to continue on the trip and look for quiet places to hang out.  I don't know how often I'll find WiFi access, so I'm not sure how often I'll be able to post happenings along the way, but I'll post as often as possible. Oh and by the way, the most recent theory on the water in the bilge is that perhaps a shower hose on the stern of the boat may be leaking a continuous drip of water such that eventually enough built up to have it show up in the bilge a long way from the origin.  This theory is now under investigation as multiple other choices have been ruled out.