This was the big run up the river. Some people choose to do it in two days but we decided one was enough.
We got up at 3:00am and left the marina by 4:00am. Boblo is a smaller marina that is not very deep, so I was armed with a flashlight at the bow of the boat making sure we got around a tight corner and crossed to the far side of the channel where it deepened a bit.
Tara steered us through the first leg of the river and Lake St. Clair and we passed some freighters and went under the new bridge and the Ambassador Bridge.
I took over at the St Clair River and got us to the edge of Sarnia Bay Marina where Tara got us safely docked. While getting close to the marina we heard five loud horn blasts from behind and turned to see the largest freighter the great lakes can hold coming up behind us quickly (five blasts means make your intentions clear). So I quickly steered us right to the edge of the channel and it passed by us.
Sarnia Marina was really nice and we had a wonderful dinner at the marina restaurant.
The next day we attempted to leave, got off the dock and when we tried to go forward…no such luck. Thankfully we hadn’t gotten too far from the dock and we able to throw some lines and wrangle ourselves back in again. The transmission was our issue. The shift linkage drifted and wouldn’t go in forward. Tara managed to get it fixed but with half the day already gone we decided to spend another night in Sarnia. We ended up walking 6.6km round trip to a marine store where we picked up much more than we had planned and walked back in the rain (Bridgeview Marine Services is probably the best stocked marine store we’ve been in to date besides Holland Marine). We spent the evening relaxing and getting ready for the next leg of our journey.