Our first boat happened one afternoon in 1990 while I was drinking Scotch in the back yard at our Richmond home. I saw an advertisement in the Ottawa Citizen for a 25 foot Bayliner. I wasn't really looking for a boat but it appealed greatly. It was on Big Rideau lake at a run-down marina in Rideau Ferry. The boat was OK and it was $30 thousand so we bought it. We named it Knockando for the name of the single malt I was drinking when I decided to buy a boat. And so it began...
We learned to operate the boat under the watchful eye of Kurt, the German dock-master there, and spent a season enjoying the locks, camaraderie and well, the boating life.
The next year, on our summer vacation, we ventured down the Rideau River to Kingston and the 1000 Islands area. Although our boat's final drive went kaput and was butchered by a so-called mechanic at Kingston Marine we loved the area and the new found freedom of a massive, beautiful cruising area with no locks. We decided to leave the junk-yard marina we were in and, with some sadness, Kurt.
In the spring Jon and I took the boat to Prescott on the St Lawrence River. We were lured by an impeccable marina and cute dock-hands on loan from college for the summer. We summered there but found we were an hour's cruise on plane (think: $$$) out of the islands so we moved to a marina more in the thick of the Islands. We moved our boat to Holiday's Afloat Marina in Ivy Lea.
Then we went to the Toronto boat show. Big mistake financially but good in the long run. We bought the second Knockando, a new 1990 30 foot Bayliner we bought in January 1992. It was spacious and had a single gas-sucking 454 Mercruiser but it was ours and it was new and it was financed.
We cruised a few years down in 1000 Islands and had wonderful weekends and vacations there. But we could not see getting the boat we wanted long term due to the cost of paying the house and boat mortgages and just running that gorgeous sounding 454! So we sold it resolving to get back into boating at a later date.
And that was The Dream. Buy a boat and cruise off into retirement following the sun.
