Part 2 "Finding fuel and avoiding fishing gear"

The next morning I woke up to the sound of the commercial fishing crews readying their boats for a day of fishing on Lake Erie.  To be honest, I really didn't sleep all that well as I was often waking up to check the position of the boat relative to the shore.  As we did not have any electricity besides battery power, coffee was not an option.  We had a few more sandwiches with water for breakfast, carried out the engine checks, and went over the charts.  I was looking for a port to pull into that might have some fuel and would make a good halfway break to our day.  Port Stanley seemed to be a large commercial port….”they should have fuel” I thought to myself, so I entered the way points into the GPS/Chart plotter.  We fired up the engines; while they were warming up we finished our breakfast and opened up all of the windows on the bridge.  It was still cold in the morning and we both had a foul weather coats on as we weighed anchor and slowly made it out of Erieau Bay.  The winds had died down a bit but the lake was still throwing up waves in the 1.5 to 2 meter range.  For the most part, when I sailed I would have loved this weather, but the confused seas had the waves arriving in all directions still, which made it challenging to steer.  One thing I did learn from the previous day was what speed we would be most comfortable at, knowing that, we set the throttles and settled into the helm seats and followed the course set for Port Stanley.  As the morning moved on, it became clear that we would be on high alert looking out for fishing gear.  Neither one of us knew that there was such an active fishery on Lake Erie. The charts have notes on them about commercial fishing, but we really didn’t know what to expect.  As it turned out, the fishermen of Lake Erie use nets, so we would keep scanning the horizon for black poles which marked the floats that were attached to the nets.  Our biggest fear was snaring a net in our props, not only would we have to deal with some angry fishermen (and you can’t blame them, this is their livelihood) but we would also be disabled.  We kept plenty of distance between our boat and their nets opting to make a detour in order to keep safe.  The lake did seem to calm down as the sun started to warm us up (either that or we were just growing accustomed to the motion). 

Once we spotted the entrance to Port Stanley we made our way into the outer harbor and tied up to a commercial dock, this would be my first time docking.  We asked some people who were out for a late morning stroll if they knew where the fuel dock was, lucky for us they did and they also knew what channel the bridge operator monitored (this was a good thing as they were on 16, which made no sense to us normally bridge operations are on 14).  We called on the draw bridge requesting a bridge opening. After traffic and pedestrians were clear he opened up and we passed, he cautioned us to keep to our starboard side in the channel as this is where the deeper water was.  As we slowly made our way down the river into town, we finally spotted the fuel dock and the approach would be a little tricky with a crosswind and current working against us.  I approached the dock and as luck would have it my first attempt had to be aborted.  I then continued past the dock asking the dock hands if there was deep enough water for me to turn around, there was, and so I turned the boat to face into the wind.  There comes a time when your first approach doesn't quite go to plan you are better off aborting and starting a new approach at a better angle. The second approach was much better and we were able to tie off. This would not be the last time I abort a docking attempt. I shut down the engines and we started taking on fuel.  As it turned out, I made the fuel dock owners day as we emptied his tanks filling ours, a quick calculation confirmed that the fuel flow meters were working properly and we headed back out to the lake for the final leg of our trip.  We waited for the draw bridge to open up again in the middle of the channel holding the boat in position using the shifters.  I guess it was good practice, a bit stressful but good practice.  Once we passed through the bridge opening, we headed back out onto the lake. We continued our voyage dodging fishing nets along the way.

Next, squalls on the horizon and arrival at Turkey Point!