Saturday June 30th.

We had another beautiful beat to Thwate Island, at least that was what it was called on the Canadian Parks literature.  On our charts it was called Link Island.  Perhaps this is a US/Canadian thing.  In any case there was no room to anchor there and all the mooring buoys were taken.  So we found a nice spot on Huckleberry Island, 44° 18.13N 76° 08.64W.  Anchoring is interesting here in the 1000 Islands.  So far we’ve had a lot of difficulty getting our anchor to set.  We always set the anchor and run the motors hard astern to make sure it’s set well.  After all if it doesn’t hold against the engines what chance would it have against a strong wind?  Today, we set the anchor, motored astern slowly and it seemed to hold.  We put some more power on and it dragged.  We tried again and this time it held against full engines so we were happy(ish).  I dived on the anchor to make sure and discovered that the bottom was hard as rock!  However our anchor had pulled up against a shoulder and had dug in, so I was happy.  The interesting thing is that all the locals rave about the multitude of anchorages in this area.  So in observing the locals today, they seem to throw an anchor overboard, maybe back up a little, then get out the gins and tonic or boat toys or whatever.  But by 7pm they had all left.  So maybe that’s the difference – you can take a lot less care over your anchoring technique if you’re only there for a few hours in daylight.  We did a few jobs on the boat, had an interesting meal made up of leftovers, and are about to get the backgammon set out for the first time in many years. 

Ship’s log: 1735.5 Today's log: 11.3nm, Season total: 100.0nm