Home! (Boston to St. Paul, via Buffalo, Midland, Sault Saint Marie and Hager City)

On Wednesday while Jay worked and Danielle attended grad school orientation, Amy, Kathleen and I visited the S/V Corwith Cramer, a 134-foot sailing brigantine owned by the Sea Education Association (SEA), who Amy has worked for over the past several years. The vessel was visiting from its homeport of Woods Hole, MA, and hosted an open house in Boston Harbor. It was a lot of fun to tour the ship, learn more about the SEA’s mission, meet the crew and enjoy watching Amy reminisce with shipmates, past and present. 

Our family reunion in Boston was brief, and we dropped Amy off at the airport on Thursday evening, then drove west to pick up our trailer. It was fun crossing the Hudson River and driving on I-90 in New York, which runs parallel to and is often in view of the Erie Canal. We saw locks we’d transited, dams we’d passed, and channels we’d followed, appreciating the special experience of seeing a waterway from both the land and water sides. 

We hitched up the trailer in Buffalo, crossed the border back into Canada and arrived at Bayport Yachting Centre in Midland, ON, where Dragonfly was waiting for us, arriving right at dusk and just ahead of a round of thunderstorms that lit up the sky and unloaded heavy rains. We received another message from the universe that it was time to stop cruising, when one of the deck windows over our bunk sprung a leak in the middle of the night. Fortunately our forward berth is large enough that there was still room for both of us to sleep without anybody on the wet spot. 

On Saturday morning, we hauled Dragonfly out of Lake Huron at the nearby public ramp, offloaded our gear, changed the engine and gear oils (best done while the fluids are still warm) and left Midland. Less than an hour into our road trip, one of our trailer tires disintegrated after hitting a bump in the road. One of the advantages of a dual-axle trailer is that if you lose a tire, the wheel doesn’t crash into the pavement, which can damage the wheel, bearings and axle. Since our trailer was still stable on the remaining three tires, we could safely exit the highway and pull over on flat ground of our choosing. We installed our spare tire (new this year) and got rolling again, a bit worried about the three other tires of the exact same age, and immediately stopped at the nearest Canadian Tire superstore to replace the spare. An hour later, we were back on the Trans-Canada Highway heading west, behind schedule but not derailed. 

As frustrating as it was to have a blowout, I was reminded of the first phrase that I learned after moving to Minnesota in 1995–“it could be worse.” Our tire failure happened during the day, in good weather, on a four-lane road, we kept control of the trailer, had a spare, and knew how to install it. Thinking back on our summer, this was only the third mishap that we’d experienced; the others being the grounding on the Trent-Severn Waterway, which resulted in a couple of gouges on our rudders, and the partial boat flooding in Vermont while home for Danielle & Jay’s wedding, which did no permanent damage. Otherwise, our inexpensive little vessel performed flawlessly, with no breakdowns or systems issues that seem to plague all boats. I’ve always believed that you make a certain amount of your own luck, with good design, maintenance practices and decision-making, but shit definitely happens out there and Murphy’s Law applies to everything. We feel extremely fortunate.

After an overnight stop in Sault Saint Marie, MI, we arrived home on Sunday. We parked Dragonfly in her storage spot in Hager CIty, WI, next to the mast and boom, offloaded a few more things, had dinner at Smokin’ Oak in Red Wing, MN and drove to our St. Paul condo. 

This will be the last post of this segment. Thank you for following our adventures, wishing us well on our voyage and for all of the incredibly positive comments about the blog. It’s been an awesome summer and we have enjoyed sharing it with you!