July 12, 2011 Kingston

I thought we were all rowing in to see the Village of Stella but Lew put his dingy on his davits. Kerry and I did row in and tour the village. It was really rural, but nice and neat. I bought a paper at the general store, and moo’d at the cows without much response.

We raised anchor at 9:45 and set the jib for Kingston. The wind was light and following. I have learned to respect Environment Canada when they issue a high wind warning, which they had done for later in the day. When we pulled into Confederation Marina it was blowing 20 knots. We stopped at the Olympic Yacht Harbor to fuel and pump out on the way. Fortunately Lew had called the marina boys to help us dock, so all went well. It was 10.7 miles to Kingston. The trip took a little less than 3 hours, including the fuel stop. We are one day ahead of schedule now. We hope to maintain that and perhaps pick up another day so we can spend some time at Port Dalhousie before we do the Welland again.

We spent the first hour and one half here convincing the marina staff that they had approved a three day stay for us, and then securing Excalibur and Annie M for the high winds. As I write this the waves are slapping on the stern because of the high winds.

I spoke to Art at Tartan to see if I could get new parts for the stern shower but they have switched suppliers and I need to get Grohe parts from another supplier. I will wait until I get home to deal with this, unless the problem gets worse.

We skipped our usual cocktails at 4:00 in order to do what we call a pub crawl. We did that last time when we were here, although we only got to two pubs. We blamed the boat cocktails for that. This time we were determined to get to three pubs. Seems like there are dozens here. Well, that would only be correct if you counted the many restaurants with outside patios. Sometimes there are two or three in one block. I am proud to say we got to the Toucan, Tap House/Merchant and Tir Nan Og. We had Guinness, Stella, appetizers, chowder etc., and came home stuffed, bloated but proud of our accomplishment!

Kingston is a great city. It is full of magnificent limestone buildings. It is clean, very vibrant and has lots of interesting museums, restaurants, shops, etc. At one time it was the capital of Canada.