Slip E 21 – Bay Port Yachting Center
Midland, Ontario – 44°52’03.5″N 79°46’48.9″W

Greetings once again from Slip E21 at Bay Port Marina! It’s Catherine’s turn at the blog wheel!

It’s been a busy time with boat repairs, trying to stay cool in the midst of a heat wave and having a birthday celebration. Since the last blog entry, Wally has been working on repairing windows. The starboard galley window had been leaking and unfortunately had been glued shut. This took considerable effort to dig out the sealant which was like tar.

Dave from Templeton Windows here in Midland very kindly came by and gave us advice on how to remove the window safely. He even lent us some suction cup tools for handling tempered glass windows. This project had to be delayed because we couldn’t find the right product for the sliding window tracks.

The curtains came down to clean the window and this really brightened up the galley. I thought briefly about rigging something up with doweling and fusible binding on fabric because I didn’t bring the sewing machine with me but decided not to do anything yet. The original curtains will have to go back up and will be replaced as soon as possible (!)

Wally built a lovely cedar deck box to put the barbecue and propane tank in on the aft deck. He’s got lots of comments on it from passers by in the marina. Some people were wondering if it was going to be a planter box.

Once it was finished I put tung oil on it, one coat down, two more to go.

We had a trip to Barrie to look at fabric at Len’s Mills store, bought folding chairs and side tables at Jysk summer sale and enjoyed a Thai dinner.

It’s been beastly hot. The a/c on the boat has a hard time keeping us cool so we mostly resort to fans. We went to the movie theatre to see Superman and eat popcorn in the cool air. When the movie finished, we were told to exit the emergency doors as the Midland Fire Department had been called due to a strange odour. Maybe someone burnt the popcorn! Whenever we see the firefighters, we think about our nephew Brent who works for the Calgary Fire Department!

Happily, the weather shifted, and we’ve had nights where we have needed hoodies and long pants. Some rain but not much. Just enough to keep my pink geranium watered. This is the extent of my gardening right now.

Tuesday the 15th was my 69th birthday and I had a lovely day. Started with a swim at the Y, then a latte and treats at Grounded Coffee downtown Midland with Wally. I was the carpenter’s assistant for the afternoon. We had dinner at Rawley Lodge where I worked as a waitress/chambermaid one summer in the mid-70’s.

The place is completely transformed from the ramshackle place it was when I worked there. Very chichi.

So that was a trip down memory lane, not the same emotional impact as Emerald Lake where I was in 1977! I had so many warm birthday greetings from family and friends, thank you!

July 9, 2025

Slip E 21 – Bay Port Yachting Center
Midland, Ontario – 44°52’03.5″N 79°46’48.9″W

Ahoy!

It’s been a few days since our last blog entry. We’ve been hard at work on the boat, checking off lots of odds and ends. Unfortunately we are still waiting for work to begin in the engine compartment – hopefully that will happen this week. On Monday a service technician from the marina came to the boat and went over our “below decks” project list with me. We have prioritized the items on the list into two main categories – to be done immediately and can wait until September.

This morning I was up at 5:00am to answer the call of nature. We are not using the toilets on board but the washrooms here at the marina are only a few steps away, so it is not a hardship – we just have to get dressed in order to go to the loo. The sunrise was so beautiful that I decided to stay up and treat myself to a cup of coffee on the flybridge and contemplate the day ahead.

We are getting quite familiar with the Town of Midland and know our way around to all of the “essential” business locations – Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Home Depot, Walmart, Loblaws, Salvation Army Community Store (roughly equivalent to the Goodwill stores/donation centers in London) and a wide variety of other businesses. Midland is a really nice town and with a population of about 18,000 it has lots of amenities. Catherine has even joined the YMCA here to make use of the indoor pool and the gym. It’s a good way for her to escape from me and the chaos of the boat for an hour or two several times a week.

This past Saturday we went to a Strawberry Tea at St. Paul’s United Church on the main street in Midland. The church is massive and almost 125 years old. The Order of the Eastern Star ladies served tea in delicate China cups, pink lemonade, crustless and pinwheel sandwiches followed by strawberry shortcake.  It brought back a lot of childhood memories for both of us from the 1960s and early 70s – me thinking about mom and dad at our church teas in St. Andrews, NB and Catherine thinking about her Aunt Glenda in London.

The weather has been hot for the past week with only a few breaks in the heat. Thankfully the boat has air conditioning and that helps quite a bit for sleeping. Older boats are hard to cool and heat because there are so many large windows and very little insulation so the AC was having a very hard time keeping up. Our position on the dock has us facing directly into the mid to late afternoon sun so we are keeping the blue sunbrella coverings on the windshield.

Even with the coverings in place we could still feel the intense heat radiating inside the boat so we removed the sunbrella, covered the windows with tinfoil and then put the sunbrella coverings back in place. That made a huge difference for the AC. Our neighbours were probably wondering what we were doing with the tinfoil – perhaps we should have made some tinfoil hats for ourselves while we were at it. After all, there could be aliens out there trying to probe our brains!

While we are waiting for work below decks to begin we have been doing some exterior and interior renovations. We also rented a small storage locker at a location close to the marina. We have a lot of stuff onboard that we don’t need right now so getting it out of the way makes it easier for us to get things done. Plus we removed things we don’t want at all.

One of our neighbours on the dock asked Catherine if we have anything left onboard – as all he has seen us do is cart loads of stuff off the boat – old microwave, TV, propane stove, cushions, dingy davits, rusted out BBQ, side curtains off flybridge bimini, lawn chairs, etc, etc.

This week I removed the propane range/oven and replaced it with an electric induction cooktop. For safety reasons we are not comfortable using propane appliances inside the boat – especially when the fuel tank setup does not meet current code and it would cost a lot of money to remedy. The boat has a diesel generator onboard so we basically have “shore power” no matter where we are. As a result it was an easy decision to make the switch to electric.

I made a set of sliding “drawers” to fit inside the space where the oven used to be. The galley is really nice but there is not much pantry space. Some people may wonder why we would choose to do without an oven on board. My philosophy is that if the food we want can’t be fried, boiled or BBQ’d – then we don’t need it or we can always find a restaurant or a bakery where we can get it!

Yesterday Catherine decided she wanted to wash the exterior of the boat. She has gone as far as she can (for now) washing the interior so she felt it was time to spruce up the outside. I warned her that washing a boat this size is like scrubbing 10 cars. But hey, who am I to refuse when someone volunteers? She wanted to get going on it while I was doing my cabinet work in the galley.

Happily for me washing the exterior of the boat has now officially joined the “pink” job list. For non boaters, “pink” jobs are traditionally done by the ladies and “blue” jobs are done by the guys. The blue jobs are typically the most glamorous – crawling around on your hands and knees inside the engine compartment, fixing leaky plumbing, unplugging blocked toilets, searching for stuff inside storage lockers, etc.

Its been a lot of work getting the boat back into shape but we are enjoying ourselves, or at least we are trying to convince ourselves of that and it is very rewarding at the end of each day to take a step back and feel satisfied with our accomplishments and progress.

Once in a while we take a wee break from our long list of tasks and celebrate the simple things in life. Even after all these years I still know how to show my best gal a good time!

Cheers!