So we opened the cottage over Memorial Day Weekend. Overall, it went really well with no giant issues. Victoria Day was the weekend before, so not too many people were around. The cottagers association dock was practically empty when we had to go to town for supplies and there was barely any boat traffic even though the weather was great. The water was a lot warmer than it usually is on opening weekend. There was no mice invasion since we were up in February, water was down even further and the only real cleanup was because some birds got into the outhouse this spring.
Sometimes at Action Island we have some pretty amusing mishaps. This opening weekend had a pretty good island blooper – luckily it was salvageable though. When opening the cottage, the first thing we do after driving all night to get there is to take the canoe off of the car and canoe out to the island. Once at the island, we get the boat in the water and the motor on the boat. We then go back to the mainland in the motorboat to get our stuff from the car. Once we get back to the island with our stuff, we pull the boat up on the beach as high as we can, we then start doing stuff like getting the dock in the water. We always pull the boat up on the more sheltered side of the beach – that way the current won’t pull the boat out to sea. That’s why we were so surprised when we saw the boat was gone. Luckily, the runaway boat ran aground on a nearby island, so we didn’t have to go too far in the canoe to go find it.
Pardon the blurry pic, but this is the best I could do with my zoom:
The boat’s motor was tilted when it decided to run away and the prop didn’t get banged up on the rocks, so they towed the canoe back to our island.
In today’s water segment, we have two videos. The first one is of Victoria wake surfing off of her in-laws ski boat. In the second video, which could be considered an island blooper, we have me waterskiing on two skis for the first time ever. All was going well until I managed to lose a ski because the bindings weren’t tight enough. Face planting on water when you’re going really fast hurts more than you’d think. Hopefully I can ski a bit more before the end of the season.
Our friend Roger and the husband are up the cottage right now with Colleen and myself. Today we decided to go on a roadtrip. We debated between going to Midland to see Castle Village because the husband hasn’t been there before and we also debated going north to see the French River Trading Post. We decided to make the hour+ drive north to the French River because we found an advertisement for them that promised “Hungry Bear Every Hour”. The husband has never seen a real live bear, so the French River won.
When we drove up there we were sad to find out that there is no real bear. It’s just a man in a bear suit that sings songs and dances every hour – such disappointment. At least Colleen made herself a friend there.
This past weekend, my husband and dad helped our friend, John, with an odd favor. John has a place on one of the bigger islands. At his cottage, he has a sailboat and a trailer. The trailer came over in a boat years ago and he used it to get the sailboat in and out of the water at the cottage. John now has a place on the mainland though, so he needed to get his sailboat and the trailer to the new place. According to John, getting the trailer to the island in the boat was awful, so to get it back to mainland he came up with a new plan. He wanted to attach the trailer to the sailboat, and tow the sailboat back to mainland with the trailer riding under it. Amazingly enough it worked. He had to tow the boat and trailer for a few miles, and it took a few hours, but the boat and trailer arrived at the boat launch safely.
On the Cottage Life forums, there’s a thread about bloopers at the cottage. Many situations seem to go wrong in humorous ways at Action Island, so I decided to share one of my favorite island bloopers over there. The story is so good that I had to share it on here too.
A few years ago, one of our guests for the weekend graciously offered to make dinner for us. He decided to make us pasta that night and he said he didn’t need any help in the kitchen and that we should just relax on the porch until dinner was ready. When he called us for dinner and my family saw the dinner table, we were in tears for a long time because we were laughing so hard. He kept asking us what was wrong, and we couldn’t even stop laughing long enough to tell him what was so funny. On the table we saw a huge bowl of spaghetti – the only problem was that huge bowl was actually one of the pee pots. Our guest said that he found it on the back porch (where it had been drying upside down), and thought it was from the kitchen, so he rinsed it out and put the pasta in it. Though he cleaned it, none of us could stomach the idea of eating dinner out of the pee pot. All we ate was the garlic bread that night.
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