Two More Port Days at Trent Port Marina!

This blog will chronicle our (Pat and Patty Anderson's)

cruising adventures on the Great Loop!

DAYS 93 and 94 - July 2 and 3, 2017

Kind of short blog post covering two days! Here is a Google Earth shot of Trent Port Marina, just so there is some kind of picture!

Google Earth View of Trent Port Marina

Sunday, 7/2/17.  I dock, and probably many of the other docks, at the Trent Port Marina, emptied out quite a bit today!  A lot of the Canadian boats have returned home. Our new friends Ron and Nan on their mastless sailboat, Romso, left today, and we have their itinerary on the Trent-Severn and Georgian Bay, so we may see them somewhere else along the way!

The most exciting thing that happened was that our fresh water pump decided to stop pumping right in the middle of sanitizing the water tank. We had pumped out the remaining water in the tank and refilled it with chlorine water, 1 cup bleach for 20 gallons of water. Right in the middle of emptying the chlorinated water, the pump just stopped pumping, even though the pump motor was still working.

I went up to the marina office for a recommendation for a boat mechanic to replace or repair the pump, but I was not hopeful, since we were right in the middle of Canada Day weekend, with the official holiday being Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  On top of that the tap on our Aquatainer had broken, making it almost impossible to use!  The marina staff did have a recommendation, and gave me a name and phone number, Dave Gartshore at (613) 921-7269. I called Dave, and not only did he answer his phone, he said he would come by our boat tomorrow. Good news indeed, because we are scheduled to depart on Wednesday morning, and we did not see how we could leave without a functioning fresh water system!

The rest of our day was less exciting! We had another re-provisioning trip to the Metro supermarket across the street from the marina. The rest of the day was spent walking the dog, talking with folks on the dock or just kicking back playing computer and reading our Kindles! We also chatted a bit with Jim and Joan from Rochester on their spiffy new express cruiser in the slip next to ours, and told them about our Loop. Jim works for the Rochester Institute of Technology, and has a few (quite a few, actually) more years to work before they could do the Loop, but they are enjoying cruising a few weeks at a time, just like we did when we worked! Jim is an amateur videographer, and came by as they were going out to dinner and asked if he could include video of Daydream in the video he is currently working on! We'll be anxious to see that!

Monday, 7/3/17. Dave had said he had a diesel tank to repair before he got to our boat. We had just made our Bloody Ceasars (Clamato, vodka, Worchestershire sauce, lemon juice and horseradish, we learned this from our Canadian friends at Birch Bay!), when Dave came by around 12:30 p.m. I had already cleared the path to the pump for him (why is everything on a boat in some inaccessible location?). He had the pump out in an amazingly short time, and tested it - it was, as we knew, running but not sucking, or it "sucked" in a totally different meaning of the word! We watched as Dave disassembled it, with running commentary such as "I sure hope I remember how to put it back together!"

It turned out the valves inside the pump were full of lumps of crystallized minerals that had accumulated over the years, and were preventing the valves from closing (don't ask me about the workings of the pump, I am just going from memory on what Dave told me). He cleaned under each valve one by one - I think there were four of them - and put it back together.  I cleaned the inline filter screen in the water line ahead of the hose, and we turned it on, and we once again had a functioning fresh water system, and it worked better than it ever had before! Instead of hundreds for a new pump, Dave charged us his labor rate for a one hour minimum of $60! We were happy campers! If you are ever in Trenton, Ontario, and need a boat mechanic, Dave is your guy!

The rest of our day was pretty much a repeat of the day before, except we didn't go shopping! I also went back over to Jim and Joan's boat in the next slip over, and got a tour of their boat. It has a vee-berth, galley and enclosed head inside, and an aft berth under the helm station (and cockpit?) that they use for storage, along with the commodious engine room, where they store their generator, and apparently could store a cooler and a few bins.  It has a top speed in excess of 50 miles per hour, but their usual cruising speed is 35. I'll bet that takes a bit more fuel than our 1 gallon per hour at 6-8 miles per hour! Jim also has a DJI Phanton 3 Standard drone, the same model I have, and actually flew it here for about two minutes.  

Nothing more to report, so...OUT!