Leaving Malletts Bay
Thursday June 29th
We spent 7 nights at Champlain Marina. We only planned on five days but things happen. Tom and Colletta planned to rent a car and travel to Maine to see a couple that they met while cruising. We decided to rent a car for 3 days so we could be mobile. We ran some errands on the first day. It turns out that in Vermont, they rent a lot of 4 wheel drive trucks. Yep, that is what Enterpise gave us under their “You Pay We Pick” plan. It was comfortable and easy to drive and had a crew cab.
We had a very busy winter prepping the boat for new brightwork (some would call it varnish). If we weren’t doing that we were either out shopping or visiting with people. When we got underway in March things got very busy with the normal activities involved with moving a big boat. My real point is that we were either too busy or having too much fun with others to get our blog into a current state. Well as you may know by now, we finally forced ourselves to get current. It took a couple of long days while we were in the Lake Champlain Marina. John spent so much time here hunched forward in a lounge chair and working on a computer that his back went out a day or so later. It’s been almost a year since that last happened. He spent a lot of time using a heating pad that Greek’s Folly had on board and that seemed to help a lot.
When the blog was current, we ran our other errands like going to Costco and other stores to stock up prior to entering Canada. Another item on our agenda was determining how best to communicate while in Canada. John has a old “Grandfathered” unlimited data plan that is better than the current Unlimited plans that Verizon offers today. Why is the old one better? The answer is that the don’t slow down your data speeds like they do on the new plans. Even though most marinas advertise having wifi, most of them are lousy, spotty, incredibly slow or just don’t work. In those cases (read very often), we use the hotspot on John’s phone. It turns out that our monthly average is around 40 Gig. Some months as little as 20 gig and other months as high as 75 gig. After hours either on the phone with Verizon people or face to face with a Verizon people in a store, we finally found a workable solution. So we now have Pam’s phone and iPad together on a separate account away from John’s old Unlimited plan. Her new account has both unlimited talk, text and data (with restrictions that will slow data speeds down) and Canada and Mexico. This is great and we will save about 4 bucks a month. Since we will be in Canada for a couple of months or so this summer and longer next summer this works out very well. So, Pam can call, text and surf to her hearts content while in Canada and everywhere else. John – not some much (I will have to use Pam’s phone in Canada. We will forward my phone calls to Pam’s phone but texting will be dead.
We had planned to leave the Marina a couple of days ago but both of our boats had issues with their windlass that is used to deploy and retrieve the anchor. We waited a extra day for a bottle of grease for Tom’s (he was not happy). Both of the guys worked on our windlass but were forced to stop because of rain. Ultimately, by the time the guys got finished the next day, it was kind of too late to leave the Marina. We could have gone but they were predicting a lot of rain so we stayed. Well, it didn’t rain at all and the weather was perfect.
The guys working on Greek’s Folly.
We hit the fuel dock at 8 this morning for fuel and a pump out prior to entering Canada. We opted to bypass Valcour Island and get closer to the Canadian Border. We pulled into a bay at the north end of a island to anchor out. Of course, it picked that exact time to start raining. To make matters more difficult, the windlass did not want to lower the anchor. John had moved some windlass parts from one side to the other in hopes of things working smoother. We will see in the morning if all goes well.