Anchoring at Valcour Island -- and we'll take a break for a while

Wednesday & Thursday, August 9 &10 -- Burlington to Valcour Island anchorage and back -- 28 miles roundtrip 

We spent Wednesday morning doing chores. Ashley drove us to downtown grocery and hardware stores before she and Griffin left to drive back to Lexington. It was nice to have some down time. We had lunch onboard and then left at three for a short run over to Valcour Island. John was anxious to take advantage of the nice weather to anchor out after two grey and wet days. We were not the only ones with this idea, however, and the two harbors that we looked at both had lots of other boats in them. We ended up choosing Smuggler Harbor because it was smaller and there were just three other boats when we arrived. (One more showed up later but rafted off against another boat.) Given the small harbor and limited room for swinging at anchor, John decided to run a line ashore from the stern so that we were secured at both ends -- bow to the west and stern to the east. This involved a lot of monkeying around with the dinghy, which John always enjoys.

Our stem and stern arrangement worked fine until the wind shifted during the night and we started to roll with a swell coming from the south. This woke Janet up around 3:30 and John an hour later. We cast off the shoreline to see how the boat would respond. She pointed her bow south into the wind as expected, but we were then in only about six feet of water with not much clearance from shore. This could have worked except the anchor wasn't holding well -- John could feel it dragging. We decided not to bother with trying to re-anchor and instead set out for Burlington around 5:30 -- our earliest starting time ever! (This was after John went ashore in the dinghy in the dark to retrieve our line.) We found ourselves facing a nasty chop coming from the south, so we ran slow almost the entire way. It was a tough slog. But we had a lovely sunrise, which we don't get to see very often. 

Here's how nice Lake Champlain looked when we started out. 

And here are kids swimming off Lone Rock Point just north of Burlington. 

These are photos of our anchorage. The first one shows the point to which we ran a shoreline (with bumpers tied to it in case someone else might come along) and the second shows our neighbors. The guys way in the back of the cove didn't have to worry about the wind shift, but they got there before us and there wasn't room for another boat. 

We got back to our marina in Burlington about 7:30 and immediately went back to bed. We were both beat after a rough ride and an unpleasant morning wake-up. We woke up a few hours later, walked over to the gourmet food truck (Farmers and Foragers) parked just outside the marina for lunch, and then walked into town for some shopping. The Burlington waterfront is very nice. It was all industrial a hundred years ago and is now all recreational, with a 7-mile long walking and biking path alongside or near the water.

This photo looking north shows the US Coast Guard station in the center, our marina to the left, and the city waterworks immediately right and behind the USCG station. Behind the waterworks is an open steel frame structure called the Moran Frame. The second photo shows how it looks from the top of our boat. This is an interesting piece of public art that fits with the overall Burlington waterfront. The steel frame was for an old municipal coal-fired power plant that was decommissioned in 1986. This is what the city finally decided to do with the old plant after 24 years of studies and surveys and such. Very creative. 

John and Janet will have a nice dinner in Burlington tonight, and then drive tomorrow to Lexington, MA to get ready for our usual week in a cottage on MacMahan Island, Maine with all the kids and grandkids. So the blog will go silent for awhile. Thanks for reading!