"But think how easy it's getting. Isn't it nice to pick up a new skill?"
Kay had to agree. All day, we had been in lockstep with our lock mates, fanning out in open water but soon again tucked in bow-to-stern with one another. Cruiser captains have an understandable wariness of rental houseboaters; they tend to suck in their breath when the big boxes creep too close to their gleaming fiberglass hulls. But we knew we had made the cut when one of the captains complimented our technique at "locking through."
Houseboats for hire at Egan Marine on Pigeon Lake, two hours northeast of Toronto.
(Gerald Martineau - The Washington Post)
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After that, we became friendlier with the long-distance folks, and we began to look appraisingly at their boats. Although I must have been doing the same thing, I caught Kay peeking into cabins and lingering over a few telltale details -- windowsill herb gardens, bookshelves heavy with more than the usual summer paperbacks, a parakeet. It
wasn't like looking into people's cars, or even RVs. It was like looking into their houses.
We put up for a night at a marina at Young's Point, and instead of cooking we had dinner at a nearby restaurant, on a deck overlooking the water. The restaurant had a marina of its own, where -- right next to us -- the biggest cruiser we had shared locks with that day was moored. The owner was barbecuing lamb on deck; his guests were slipping in and out of the plush spacious cabin, drinks in hand.
"I wonder what he does for a living," I said to Kay.
A few minutes later, a gorgeously restored antique seaplane buzzed in for a landing and taxied up to the restaurant's dock. The pilot and a passenger, both smartly dressed, climbed out of the cockpit.
The cruiser captain stood on deck with his barbecue fork, scoping out the plane and the two fliers. His guests were equally taken with the beautiful toy.
"I wonder," one guest said, "what he does for a living."
After another night at our Wolf Island anchorage, I eased in gently toward the blue line at Lovesick while Kay stood with the bowline, ready to hop out and tie up while we waited for the lock to open. I was getting good at this now, and so was Kay -- we hardly had to tell each other what to do next. This was good, because neither of us likes to be told anything. "It's the nice thing about boats," I had said to Kay. "I don't tell you what to do, you don't tell me. The boat tells us."
But just as I was dropping the throttle into neutral, I heard a smooth, gently commanding voice -- "easy, give her a little reverse . . . turn the wheel sharp toward the wall . . ." On the wall just opposite Kay, taking charge of tying our bowline, was a guy, maybe 45, trim, every hair in place, standing next to his Egan rental houseboat. Back home, I figured, he was probably a scoutmaster or a gym teacher who couldn't get out of the habit of giving orders even when he was on vacation. Only later did I learn, from Ron Egan, that the man was a master of more than scouts. "He has a license for unlimited tonnage," Ron told me. "Just retired from the U.S. Navy. He commanded a destroyer."
Once we were in the main channel, buoys marked the way across the remainder of Buckhorn Lake and into Pigeon Lake. But after wandering off to fish in what the charts showed as sufficiently deep water, we wound up on a secondary channel, where the buoys were fewer and farther between. For the first time, we had to rely almost entirely on our reading of the charts. If we weren't accurate, we could easily be out a propeller, or worse.
Our particular challenge had to do with how narrow is narrow. The chart showed the safe channel as a dotted red line passing between a small island to port, and a much larger one to starboard. The passage seemed tight, but not startlingly so. When we looked ahead, though, what we saw was a craggy little button of an island separated from a bigger one by a mere needle's eye. And all around us was tantalizingly open water.
"This can't be it," Kay said.
