We had a good night at long point Cove despite the mosquitoes.
The weather was calm, and the stars were out that night with none of the snake visible from the Canadian wildfires.
It was a beautiful anchorage.
The next day we decided we were going to go to the Benjaman Islands on the way to Raus Island Anchorage, our next chosen anchorage.
When viewed from satellite photographs, the Benjamin Island Group looks like an old meteor crater, but is not.
The islands are part of the remnants of a craton, the interior of an old volcano that was created about 4 1/2 billion years ago when the Laurentian shield was made. As mentioned previously in another post, this area is the backbone of North America, with the oldest exposed rock on Earth.
The Benjamins are famous for their anchoring and a very much sought after mooring destination.
The anchorages proved to be very interesting and lovely. We picked out the anchorages we liked, the anchorages we didn’t like, and then moved on to Raus Island Anchorage.
We wanted to tour the Benjamins as we were going to come back through them on the way to continuing the Loop..
We had originally intended to stay in Raus Island anchorage, but realized when we got there that the holding was not good and the exposure to southwest winds was pretty high.
As there were storms forecasted later in the day, we decided to move on to Heywood Island, where there was an anchorage that was better suited to protection from the wind directions we expected later in the day.
In this part of the continent, the strongest winds from storms generally come from the southwest. If we were to get caught in that anchorage, it would have turned into a bad anchorage pretty quickly.
To get to Heywood Island, we had to go through a channel by Little Current, an old town on the northeast side of Manitoulin Island.
We pulled up anchor, and continued on to Little Current.
The only bridge access to Manitoulin Island is an old swing bridge at Little Current. It opens on the hour for as long as it takes for boats to go through from dawn until dusk.
We arrived at Little Current about 25 minutes before the bridge was to open, so we decided to stop at the public wharf at Little Current and get rid of our garbage.
As we pulled in, we noticed that there was another Katie Krogan 39 named Day Dreamer sitting at the dock, a boat just like Selkie.
It’s unusual to see another Kadey Krogen 39, as there have only been about 50 that were built in the entire world.
We briefly introduced ourselves and exchanged boat cards. (Boat Cards are business cards that each boat’s crew has prepared to provide contact information about us, including boat name, email address, phone number, etc.)
We would all see Day Dreamer in Killarney, our destination in a few days so we quickly said goodbye, tossed our lines and motored back into the channel to wait for the bridge to open.
We had to wait about 10 minutes, then the bridge opened and we went through and continued on to Heywood Island.
When we pulled into the cove at Heywood island, we realized we picked a good anchorage.
The bluffs surrounding the cove were somewhat high with trees on top, which gave plenty of wind shelter in the bay. The cove was mostly closed off so that the entrance would not allow waves to come into the harbor.
We could see thunderstorms continuing to build off to the west, but it wasn’t clear if they were coming directly towards us or passing by us.
Libbie did her standard fishing but did not have any luck. We played some cards. Libbie is a terror when it comes to playing gin, and her record playing me is exemplary . Regardless, it’s fun to play and we enjoy the game and the trash talking that goes on during it.
As the evening started to settle in and we were cooking dinner, we noticed that a rather large cell had developed to our northwest and was headed in our direction.
We realized that we were going to get hit with some strong winds.
As the storm hit, we could see the waters outside the harbor through a gap in the entrance of the cove where we were anchored. We watched the winds turn the water into solid whitecaps.
The wind strength had to have been over 40 knots with that sea state outside, but in the cove we only saw occasional gusts to 30 knots.
In fact, a couple of days later we learned that the winds had gusted to 70 miles an hour in Killarney about 10 miles from us. Several docks were torn from their moorings in that storm.
We watched a couple of boats out in the main channel struggle as they went by. We wondered why they hadn’t decided to seek shelter.
We were in much better shape. It was a good anchorage
We got a severe weather alert from the Canadian weather service similar to the tornado warning that we received last year in the waters outside of Kingston, Ontario. Selkie moved around at anchor and wemonitored its position but the anchor held as it always does when it’s set correctly. The storm blew over and we settled in for the night.
Our next destination was going to be only an hour away the next day, Snug Harbor. So we knew we had an easy day the next day. That was good, as we had put in 2 or 3 long days prior to that.
We were looking forward to resting up!
Selkie 