AquaFennatic Great Loop Blog: Beardrop Harbour to Gore Bay, North Channel

Aug 1^st – It was a hot and sunny day in Beardrop Harbour thus we did all of our boat chores in the morning and enjoyed the afternoon sun on the front of the boat with margaritas. I swam to a rock and back while Maria rowed the dingy along side. After my swim she wanted to do some more rowing thus I went along for the ride and tanned on the back seat while she rowed around the bay.

Aug 2^nd - Heat Alert today! We are still in Beardrop Harbour enjoying the beautiful weather. The Loopers that we had met in Oak Bay have left for Drummond Island in the US. Today we met a Gold Looper (a Looper who has completed the Great Loop), Steve from Barefoot Shoes. His last completed Loop was in 2009 and he’s looking at starting again next year. We haven’t seen any rain for a while thus we decided to rebed a few of the fittings in the hardtop today since we noticed that a couple of fittings were leaking during the last heavy rainfall. After our job was completed I went for multiple swims to keep cool. Later in the day Maria used her bread machine to make pizza dough to make panzerotties. She filled them with hot Italian sausage, mushrooms, red peppers, grilled chicken breast, zucchini, cheese and lightly covered the shell with garlic avocado oil and we baked them on the BBQ. They were amazing!

Aug 3^rd – Another Heat Alert today! We left Beardrop Harbour and traveled 21 miles to Gore Bay to get fuel ($1.10 / L for diesel), water, pump out, dingy gas and dump our garbage. We decided to anchor in Gore Bay and we will pull onto the dock tomorrow morning since the winds are supposed to be bad for the next couple of days. We had a great view of all the boats coming & going from Gore Bay Marina plus we were in a great spot to go swimming, however the winds really picked up in the afternoon thus I was afraid I was going to get blown away from the boat. As a backup plan I asked Maria to come get me with the dingy, however she wasn’t too thrilled about that. While we were anchored out we had visitors in a dingy that said “Are you Mike Fenn?” ... I was thinking “how do you know my name??” then we quickly realized that they’re my brother’s in-laws, Ken and Trudy Price. They heard about our trip and we had a brief conversation, however we had to cut it short since we were in the middle of eating dinner. We’ll catch up with them tomorrow when we move to the dock so we can go into town to load up on supplies before we move on.