Hey there!
Rachel and I went sailing last weekend with our landlord Alex and his partner Isabel. Alex has a yacht which he very enthusiastically works on and sails every year. In fact, at the moment, he's kind-of a hard man to get hold of because he sails so much.
Anyway, last Sunday, we were doing our slowly-getting-up-and-eating-pancakes routine when Alex phoned and invited us out on his boat for the day. We graciously accepted:
Alex owns a berth in "the Bay" (I'm sure it has a name other than that, but that's what it's called around here) which is just north of Hamilton and north-east of us here in Dundas. The marina is on the Burlington side (north-west) of the bay. The bay is part of Lake Ontario, but separated by a sandbar - which is just as well because the Hamilton steel mills dump a lot of crud into the bay. So, you don't swim in it and you don't eat any fish you catch.
The sandbar make the 3rd side of a triangle of land enclosing the Bay. The sandbar has a highway running along it, on a big trellis bridge high enough so that large ships can pass through a canal. The highway connects Hamilton to Burlington, and forms part of the QEW that runs all the way from Toronto to Niagara Falls and the US border. You can see it in the distance in the photo above as we leave the marina.
Downtown Hamilton ...
... and panning just a little left, the Steel mills. Companies Stelco and Nofasco (sp?). Used to be 5 or 6 companies we're told, but a combination of bankruptcy, merging and general downsizing means we're down to 2. Alex tells us they have industrial accidents there regularly - it's just a dangerous line of work - so we're glad other people are doing that job and not us. It's easy to be too trendy and say "Oh it's an eyesore" and "They should be shut down, they're so dangerous", but so long as we use steel, somebody has to do it.
Anyway, we went through the canal to Lake Ontario ie the really big bit of water. This is Alex steering the ship as we pass under the highway suspension bridge. There was also a scenic roadeay closer to water-level that gets raised every half-hour to let boats through. Sometimes it gets raised at odd times because a steel cargo ship is coming through...
... or just through the sheer strength of the index finger of our intrepid skipper...
Out on Lake Ontario, the water is really clear. Alex went for a swim, but didn't last long. The water is pretty cold here, being snow country in winter. It looked pretty inviting but neither me nor Rachel brought our swimmers (in fact I would have to buy swimmers - we didn't really pack much in the way of warm weather gear).
The sailing part was fun. Alex and Isabel did most of the sailing work because we didn't know the terms they were using. But we caught on and were doing more by the time we headed back to the marina.
For those of you who are still reading, here's our latest news: we put down a deposit on a car yesterday! A Mazda Protege. We decided to pay a little more in order to get something with reasonable resale value - and reasonable insurance premiums. It's ex-lease, and we have an arrangement to get an independent mechanic to take a look at it tomorrow or the next day. We can still back out if it turns out that the car completely sucks, but it seems fine on the surface, and it's had only one owner. It'll be a little over a week before we can drive away with it - the car dealer asks for 5 working days to do the detailing and servicing, which they don't do in any serious way til it has a buyer. They buy a whole lot of ex-lease cars in Toronto to sell on, which seems to be standard practice for this type of dealer. that made it easier for us because we only had to go to a couple of places, instead of driving to half a dozen private owners. Our friends Pat and Renee were nice enough to drive us there for the day.
--
This post was brought to you by Ben. Yes, just Ben.
