Covered Portage

Monday – Today we’ll leave the “Pool” and head out to Covered Portage. We began the trip by traveling down the “Narrows” – funny how big the channel feels on the way out (now that we know the depths). No problems leaving the “Pool”, except for the generator (Northern Lights M643 – 5kw). About a ½ hour into the cruise, I heard a loud noise and looked down to see that the generator shut-down. I was in the middle of trying to get through the “Narrows” and worrying about the depths, so the generator would have to wait.

I determined that the generator had overheated and thought that all the weeds that we had in the “Pool” might have sucked into the fresh water intake. So once we got to deeper and wider waters, I dove under the boat to see if that was the problem (this time the water was much warmer). No weeds, so we continued on out of Baie Fine. After some diagnosis, I found that the V-belt was very loose and needed to be tightened. Once I tightened the V-belt – all was good again – another problem fixed – onto the next problem. Like they say, if you don’t like working on boats, don’t own one. The only boats that don’t have problems, never leave the docks. A boater along the way told me that Carver has a boat model that has no engines – I guess that leaves more room for the beer.

I will say though that our boat has been unbelievably good. We have had very few problems and everything works great. We have spent the last 4 years slowly “rehabbing” all the systems and fixing anything that didn’t work – which was very little. So now we have an engine that is clean enough to eat off of with fresh new paint, cleaned and freshly painted engine bilge areas, white clean cloths under the main engine to show any oil drips, and on and on. We spend some of our time at anchorage painting areas of the bilge areas or putting another Bristol Finish on the wood work or fixing a small problem with something on the boat. The goal has always been that if it is on the boat, then it must work – if not, replace it or fix it. Also, everything is either cleaned or re-painted on every inch of the boat – still working on that project.

We made our way to Covered Portage, which is just North West of Killarny, Ontario. The anchorage is just incredible – a small harbor totally protected from all winds/waves with 300 feet white granite\quartz walls of rock on the North side and trees surrounding the rest of the anchorage. We slowly made our way back to the anchorage to find many many boats at anchor. So, we weaved in and out of the boats to find a spot. About 2 hours later all the “go fast” boats left and it was us and about 5 sailboats left for the evening. We climbed the rocks to the top of the mountain to view the boats from afar.

Internet Access: No Internet. The Verizon cell phone service works if the boat is pointing to the West – otherwise, no server.