Day 100 onward east to Blind River, Ontario

      After an “exciting time yesterday, when I changed the oil on both engines and the Admiral did laundry, it was a pleasure to get back on the water today. Today we headed to Blind River, Ontario which is 31.6 miles to the east along the coast.  We left the dock at 9:25 am and we arrived about 4 hours later in the early afternoon.  The weather was beautiful this morning with no wind and a temp of around 65 degrees as we departed Thessalon. The wind gradually built up to 6 to 8 mph with waves of 6 to 12 inches out of the south southwest during the trip. We passed the Mississagi (photo at right) headed west in the shipping channel at 13.6 mph. The view is not very clear since she was 6.8 miles away at the time.

      The photo at the left shows the marina area as we arrived at Blind River, Ontario. The buildings on the left with what looks like a silo is an abandoned saw mill. The silo was actually a sawdust burner that was used before pollution regulations. To avoid burning the saw dust, various uses were found for it, such as making fireplace logs and press board. The marina is in the center and right with a lone wind power generator in the background. The marina was very nice, including a large, new building for bathrooms, laundry, store and a small marina restaurant.

       We had eaten lunch on the boat before we arrived so after checking in at the office and taking Lucky for a short walk, it was time for a nap… Later we decided to walk into town for dinner. The old downtown was about a half mile away, but it was only about one long block long. Except for a small grocery and a rather seedy looking bar, the few businesses that were still operating were all closed, perhaps because it was a Sunday evening. The one restaurant that had sounded okay was out of business. So we continued walking along this branch of the TransCanada Highway. Other than a Tim Horton’s, the only “restaurant" that we found was actually a food truck called the Butterfly Grill (photo of the sign at the right). I had fish and chips that were quite good, and the Admiral had sausage without the bun and a “Twisted Spud”. I can best describe this as a spiral cut potato threaded on a stick that was then deep fried. It looked really great and was quite crisp since the spiral cut was quite thin.

      The menu from the Butterfly Grille is in the photo on the left. As you can see they had other interesting items on the menu such as fried dill pickles, (fried) cheese balls and Squirrel Tails, which sounded something like a flattened donut without the hole. They had a steady flow of customers, and about half of them asked what some of these items were just as we had done. We figured that the ones who did not ask were local who already knew. Well, it was hardly gourmet food, but we left satisfied both in terms of our appetites and our curiosity…

      The boat in the photo at the right had aroused my curiosity earlier so Lucky and I walked over to have a look. The boat proudly sported a Canadian flag, but when I had looked at it from a distance, I had thought that the name was “Lucky USA” when my less than perfect vision made the L and the I into a single letter U. The marina grounds were large so Lucky and I never really left them, but we covered several miles while wandering around. Along the back (north) side there was a large municipal hockey arena. Back home in Texas, where football is king, local school districts will spend $70 million to build huge football stadiums which are packed 3 or 4 times a weekend for local high school football games. Hockey is still the king in Canada, and even this really small town had a fairly large indoor hockey arena.

      The weather reports look good for tomorrow so it looks like we will be headed out in the morning. I must say that I really won’t miss Blind River, but then maybe we were just unlucky in our search for food.