Canada: The Benjamin Islands to Beardrop Harbor

Day 42

Travel Time:  3.5 hours

NM today: 26

NM total: 923

Locks today: 0

Locks total: 70

Clark started the day by listening to Roy on VHF Ch. 71 to get the weather, news, and relays.  I heard Clark announce Sea Moss in attendance for today’s broadcast.  I was down below doing last minute prep for today’s trip.  Our destination today was Beardrop Harbour.  We left port shortly after 10:00 when Roy’s show ended.

Although I hoped to do some sewing to mend Clark’s comfy shorts along the way today, I spent the entire trip as navigator reading the charts and entering waypoints into the Simrad Chart Plotter.  After I set the route from Eagle Island through McBean Channel to Whalesback Channel, I ran downstairs to pack our lunch and bring it back up as I normally do on travel days.   The route past John’s Island and to near the entrance to Beardrop has channel markers, so at that point we went to eyeballs and binoculars to find our way to the harbor. 

Once again I stood on the bow of the boat spying for rocks as we entered the harbor.  We saw someone cleaning the mud off their anchor as we came in, so Clark opted for the Danforth yet again.  We have it down to a science now.  I do the anchor setup and Clark does the heavy lifting, i.e. dropping the anchor over the side and tying it off.  For some reason though today I could not tie a bowline for love nor money.  I finally abandoned the float and left Clark to do that as part of his anchor deployment.  It took him approximately 5 seconds to tie the bowline I had not managed in 5 minutes of trying.  Grrr!  Guess I better practice my knots!

We learned about Beardrop from Clark asking various boaters with local knowledge that we found along the way where the best places are to drop anchor.  That’s how he learned about our other choice anchorages as well.  The anchor he had drawn on the chart agreed with the Ports Guide that the best spot to anchor here in Beardrop is at the narrow split between two islands.  Fortunately a boat was just leaving that very spot when we came in, so we snatched up their spot.

Late day sun on the narrow split in Beardrop Harbor

Whether the weather made us groggy due to the warm, humid temperatures, or perhaps we exhausted ourselves with go-go-go every day, but neither of us felt like taking down the kayaks or the dinghy to go exploring.  Besides being hot, the winds made the waters choppy, and I just did not feel like dealing with any of it.  Truly I felt like taking a nap, but instead I sewed the pocket on Clark’s comfy shorts and then defrosted the fridge (yet again).   Afterwards I opened the hatch over our bed and climbed into bed with my Kindle to read more of my book with a cool breeze blowing over me to keep me comfortable.

I never did nap but the lying-down-with-a-book activity was a delight.  We ate an early dinner, watched the sunset, worked on the blog (Ev), and played guitar (Clark). 

Clark Playing Guitar at Sunset

As Clark does every night, he checked the TV for channels.  We got 0 digital and 1 analog channel; however the signal strength on the one channel was not strong enough to watch.  We don’t care about the TV; it is just interesting to see if any stations broadcast to these remote places we are exploring.  The funniest part of looking for TV channels is that when we do find one we can watch, we end up seeing a rerun of Castle.  We got the slightest hint (i.e. lots of snow) of a TV channel last night in The Benjamins and sure enough there were Richard Castle and Kate Becket.  The only other show I remember seeing here in Canada was a Canadian Info-mercial for I-don’t-remember-what product! 

As we move along on our voyage now, we are getting closer and closer to the U.S. and passing through customs.  We have plans A, B, and C for crossing the North Channel as the final leg of our Canadian adventure with the route selection dependent on west winds, south winds, or just plain miserable weather.  Somewhere between here and the U.S. we need to find a restaurant to get a good meal and use up Canadian dollars that are left in our pockets, so we need to find at least one more marina with a decent restaurant before we cross the border.