It’s the first weekend of Fall and Wandering Toes is beginning to accept that our time playing in the water is almost over for this year.  We have had a fun summer as best as we could given everything that has happened outside of our boating life. We took trips to the Apostle Islands with friends, over to Houghton, Michigan for a week, we sailed to Duluth with my dad aboard to see the Duluth Tall Ships Festival in August, and we tore our boat engine apart and almost completely rebuilt it in order to replace a leaking timing cover gasket. All told, we really were busy and we put almost 750 miles under the keel this year on all of our journeys.  This and we really did not get to all of our planned adventures.

Today we removed our sails and folded them up and packed them into the car to bring home for the winter.  We began to secure some of the boat lines and halyards and make the boat ready to pull out of the water, which we will do next weekend. If the weather cooperates, we may attempt a couple of easier boat projects that we’ve been putting off before we winterize everything and cover up the boat for the winter.  Then it will be on to our yearly task of cutting, splitting and stacking our wood at home for the winter.  This usually takes us about 4 weekends to complete, but is necessary.  As many of you know, we heat our house and all of our hot water with our trusty outdoor wood boiler that has been in constant operation for the last 10 years.  So we can usually be found on October weekends stacking the woodshed and making the homestead ready for winter. After which, we will be free to travel some more and hopefully see and visit with family and friends.

We have been collecting videos all summer from our various trips and are just beginning to get into the good stuff.  I have uploaded our last Spring Sailboat Projects, Part 3 Video and our first summer sailing video to our YouTube channel. In the video Gypsy Spirit, we helped our friends Dave and Leslie bring their new boat from Washburn, WI through the Apostle Islands and up the lake to Barker’s Island Marina where they keep their boat. We made this trip with them on Memorial weekend at the very end of May.  So even though our sailing season is sadly coming to an end for this year, we will be making and releasing new sailing videos all fall and into the winter showing what we have been up to over the summer. The next several videos should be the most exciting ones yet as we get to share our sailing and travel adventures from this summer. I am also beginning to apply some of the fun video editing things that I’m learning to my videos, and I hope that people find the special effects help to make the videos great.  So follow the link on over to YouTube, turn up the volume and enjoy my latest video creation. I hope that you find it as interesting as I did, and let me know what you think.  If you enjoy seeing all of our videos, it helps if you click the Subscribe button on Our Sail Wandering Toes YouTube Channel so you will get an email whenever we upload a new video.  Click the “Thumbs-up” button if you like the videos, and we will keep trying to make them great knowing that you enjoy them.

Have a great Fall!

David and Marge Back
Sail Wandering Toes