Saturday, July 28th-Monday July 30

Saturday, July 28th-Monday July 30
In the morning, we had 2 locks (Locks 40 and 41) to go through before we got to Lake Simcoe. These lock walls had just been redone and the cables that they put on the walls for us to wrap our lines through were too long so they protruded out from the walls. They needed to be shortened. As we were leaving Gamebridge lock (Lock 41), Tom got a fender ball on the back of his boat wrapped up in the cable and it pulled the big fender ball off of his rope and it stayed in the lock as they left. We were behind him so we waited in the lock as one of the lock tenders hooked the fender and brought it over to us to keep for them. He backed up right after he realized that he lost it and must of stirred stuff off the bottom of the canal because as we left the lock we felt the boat slow down and we realized that something was on attached to our boat. We first thought that it was weeds so we reversed the engines but nothing came off so we knew something wasn’t right. We tried to clear whatever is was several times before we got out on Lake Simcoe.

Lake Simcoe is the largest body of water on Trent Severn. We had 14 miles to cross it and were looking forward to finally letting the engines do their top speed ( maybe 8-9 mph), but we had to crawl across the lake essentially on one engine letting the starboard engine idle. We finally made it to Orillia. While we were there John dove under the boat using his dive gear and a tank that Tom had on board and found out that we had grabbed a black piece of construction cloth (they were doing construction at the last 2 locks we went through) 2ft wide by 17 foot long by about 1/8 inch thick (it was much thicker when it was wet) and it had wrapped itself around the prop. We were lucky no damage was done.

We had three lovely days in Orillia. The first day there was a festival downtown with all kinds of sidewalk sales, music and vendors. The second day we went to church and met some lovely older people. They even came over to our boat to tell us about a free concert that night in the band shell in Couchiching Park. The concert band was wonderful. For dinner, we got a hamburger and fries from the famous French’s refreshment stand established in 1920. The next day we did laundry, got groceries and rode our bikes around town. The marina had a deal that you pay for 2 nights and you get the 3rd night free and we were happy to take advantage of this.

Piano sitting outside for anyone to play and the did…

Park

French’s Refreshment Stand

Three Defevers in a row. That qualifies as a Mini Defever Rendezvous.