July 20 , 2004 10 a.m.
Home, Sweet, Wet Home

Oswego, NY, is a small harbour town on Lake Ontario that draws all kinds of nuts with small boats and big apetites for salmon fishing. It was a weekend when we finally arrived at this welcome end to the Oswego and Erie Canals, and a nice one at that, which meant that everyone and their mother was out on the waterfront. Some were resting their behinds in camping chairs and attempting to fish. Others just milling around the docks to see the boats, and then some more occupying sidewalk space on the bridge were campainging - NOT for Bush. It was our last stop in the good ol' US of A. Our home, or whatever it was we were coming back to, was just across the lake: only 140 miles, for us a day and a half, or so we thought.

Tobi was gone, God knew where, re-couping from having had to observe the recent stroke of outrage of her capitan who saw red while staring at the black-on-white receipt for putting his mast up at local marina who ad, as usual, excersised a legalised form of piracy by charging arm, leg and testicles of powerless Canadian cruisers returning home. The day was pretty though, and there was no reason to stay overcast for too long. I finished up tightening shrouds and making some final checks, looking up with a lump in my throat, glad to see my precious babe looking like a real sailboat, mast up and all. We had an afternoon to kill and we both found pleasure in doing so.

After exploring the town and excersising our legs we came back to the boat and went out to anchor for the night. Wind was coming around and tomorrow was supposed to be a good time for our final dash across the lake. Tired from the day, yet unable to sleep for excitementwe were lying in our bunks thinking of how is it going to be, being back home. We were thrilled to be seeing our friends soon and looking forward implementing our Grand Plans for our lives After The Trip.

I was up surprisingly early in the morning and I started my eager-beaver motions to get under way. Tobi, as usual, was ready for anything and willingly hauled our anchor for the last time onto the boat, choking back tears all the while. The expected wind didn't materialize after all and we ended up motoring for the first couple of hours. My sails were up doing nothing but look pretty and that's defintely the only thing they were accomplishing this morning. I missed sailing like any warm-blooded sailor would and had more than enough of motoring after week of NY canals with the mast laying horizontaly looking impotent. When that first shy breeze came along I killed the engine to enjoy the woosh, for which tones like-minded people will pay top dollar to hear. That, plus I was aware that I didn't have enough fuel to continue motoring indefinetely ( I wasn't goin to give those robbers at the Marina a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. I carried some reserve, for sure, but didn't want to waste it, so when the little, shy woosh was gone and we started to bob on the water going nowhere we took the sail down and went down below to catch some zzz.

Next day wasn't much more exciting, except we burned all the fuel from the main tank. I still wasn't ready to touch my reserve so we waited painful hours for some merciful touch of the wind. It wasn't coming. I jury-rig a fuel hose to get normaly unaccesable rest bits of the fuel sitting on the bottom of the tank. Now, that wasn't such a good idea. My poor motor chocked up and refused to start again ignoring my affectionate hands attempting to clean it up and provide fresh fuel from the reserve. Tobi, with some doze of panick in her voice started to shoot at me millions of ideas of how to fix our fataly injured engine. After she emptied her clip of chatter I assured her that this wasn't so bad and we went for a cold and refreshing dip in the lake. Life would be good again if not for the flies. Hundreds and thousands of flies found our boat in the middle of nowhere and descended upon us like a Egiptian plague. On your two-hour watch you could kill some fifty or more of these pesky, stupid flies. I got really good at swating them with my old t-shirt and I found my back didn't hurt as much thanks to the excersise. It was trully sickening though watching these ugly mofos feeding on their fallen comrads. brrr.....

Night was setting in and we were getting ready to spend another night adrift when suddenly fresh breeze arose from the North-West. I jumped to it, set the sails and gladly plunged into the night leaving trail of flies behind the boat as we went ahead towards Toronto. The beauty of this particular point of sail was that our boat could keep her course without any attention to the tiller. I made myself cozy in the cokpit and we sailed through the night at a fair pace.

5:30 a.m. Tobi come close to Toronto Islands, lost her course a bit and happily dosed off. A faint breeze was coming now from the West, direction where we wanted to go. I spent couple of hours tacking, moving slowly in zigzags towards Port Credit where our trip begun last August. I tried my engine now and after few attempts something encouraging was happening. Little cough here and there and then it came grudingly on, threatening to go out any second. This way we reached familiar, old freighter that was sunk at the mouth of Port Credit to provide a brakewater for the marina. In the excitement of entering our home port I slowed down to take couple of pictures and wicked outboard had another heart attack. With no power and no sails on we coasted slowely towards the closest dock excited like kids, almost not believing we're back, in one piece, our boat still with us (minus the freaking engine:)

(M)