A first solo sail in Lake Ontario from Hamilton to Port Whitby via Toronto, Ontario, this was a great experience to learn from.
On this voyage I travelled over a number of days via Lake Ontario and picked up my family in Port Whitby for an extended long weekend. It is about 30 nautical miles from Hamilton to Toronto and another 25 nm from Toronto to Port Whitby. Overall it was good sailing, but I did encounter headwinds in both directions which extended the distance quite a bit.
After reflection, I am super happy with the performance of Sailing Vessel Northern Comfort, she sailed beautifully and without incident. She is a fine craft, sound hull and I learned to predict her movements in the waves. I was glad to have decent weather for this first solo in Northern Comfort as it did take some tweaking with the sails to get her trimmed nicely. There were billows of wind filling the sails at times, gusts over 25 knots but stead 20 knots between Toronto’s Centre Island and Port Whitby. Got her up over 7 knots at times. We had waves about a meter high. Unfortunately the wind direction changed from her beam to directly on the bow so the additional tacking almost doubled the distance.
At Port Whitby, a funny moment, we had to include our family having a difficult time getting into the dinghy from the water, we had a great time.
The people at the Whitby Yacht Club were very gracious hosts, and the staff there were very accommodating and they had great over-flowing hot showers. It was a nice club to get docked up with.
One the way back I soloed again, and had a period of very low wind, so I tried solo with the spinnaker without the pole, just some lines. It was fine, but as the wind started up again, I dropped the spinnaker half into the lake 🙁 it was a learning curve, and glad to get out. I stopped in Frenchman’s Bay, just a bit down the Lake from Port Whitby as there just wasn’t any wind. I have to caution, there was so much seaweed and grass, the prop got fowled up and in my morning departure, I had to reverse and forward quite a bit to get enough untangled to move slowly back out to the Lake.
Finally arriving back into home waters, I anchored in Burlington Bay, outside the Hamilton / Burlington Lift Bridge for a couple of days to rest, do some swimming and cleaning up the boat before returning to our home dock. I also swam under the boat and removed a good handful of sea grass tangled around my prop that I picked up in Frenchman’s Bay.
This first solo sail included travel roughly 200 nautical miles due to the amount of headwind and upwind tacking that was required. It was a great trip and learning experience I am glad to share.
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