"Sailing" the Apostle Islands - Day 2

So we all awoke about 6:30am or so and headed up to the marina clubhouse to shower and what not. Our instructor Vicki suggested we go to Egg Toss for breakfast in Bayfield. It was a nice small town restaurant with good food and decent prices. We went around the table and discussed why were there and what our sailing experience was. The Egg Toss is owned by the same gal that owns Maggies and Wild Rice restaurants in Bayfield. We also decided on what we wanted to get at the grocery store as we needed to provision the boat.

After breakfast we headed to I think the only grocery store in Bayfield A small little place but they semed to have everything we needed. Remembering we were in Wisconsin, we were able to get a 6 pack of Summit lager and two bottles of wine. At 9:30am.... why do I think that is such a good thing? Anyway, so we headed over to this little bakery, actually not everything is "little" in Bayfield... I can't remember the name but it was close to the grocery store. We ordered a blue berry pie. They will make it fresh and we are going to pick it up that evening.

So now that we have our provisions, and food, we head back to the marina and on to the boat. Its about 11:00am or so, wind is not so bad and the sun is out but it is still a bit cool out. Vicky let's us all know that seeing as it is pretty much mid-day, we are going to do docking practice. Did we ever do docking practice. Over and over and over... Each person piloted the boat at least 3 or 4 times and we switched on the dock lines each time.

We all did relatively well with the docking. I think we only had one time that I thought the boat was going to hit the dock, hard. But after a little panic, I was on the spring line and it slows the boat after it is in the slip, I had it around the cleat and no damage. There is a saying in boating, only come in to the slip as fast as you want to hit the dock. We practiced docking with a slip on the port (left) side of the boat, we practiced with the slip on the starboard (right) side of the boat. Until about I think about 6 or later as it took each person about 10 minutes each time. we would leave the slip, go out to the harbor entrance, turn around and come back in. Reverse with this boat was a bit interesting as it has pretty bad prop-walk to port so you had to compensate for that. So this day, we didn't actually sail at all.... but we needed to practice docking.

After we finally finished with the docking practice, we headed in to town for dinner. We went to Maggies, lots of flamingo sculptures but decent enough food and atmosphere. Prices aren't awful either. We decided that evening that we wanted to spend two nights on the hook. Out in the islands at anchor. We were all looking forward to that. After dinner we headed back to our boat. Vicki went back to the other boat across the way and left us to get aquainted. Perry and I each had a beer in the cockpit and Rob had some of his rum. After that we were all pretty tired so we called it a night. I was really looking forward to sailing the next day and spending a couple nights out on the water. Weather permitting of course....