15C  some cloud. Lost our game last night, too bad, I think we were actually the better team. Next time!
Doughnut day yesterday, good time as usual.

The wind continued on all day and through the night, when we woke up the next morning it was still with us. We spent the morning taking turns walking to where we could see down the lake. Finally about eleven am it looked like things had smoothed out; certainly the wind had lessened so we tossed the rest of our supplies, topped up the motor and headed out.

The moment we cleared the tip of the island we realized that things weren’t quite as smooth as we thought. The waves were about four feet high and the flat bottom boat would raise up on one wave and smash down on the next. Gerry was at the back with the motor and he slowed down and down trying to find some way of lessening the impact of each wave; we crept slowly on out into the bay and in spite of almost no headway being made the boat continued to pound violently. The bay we were crossing is about eight kilometers (five miles) across and after almost two hours we weren’t quite halfway. We were both getting worried about the fuel situation, because without headway we had no control and we didn’t dare to try refueling with out shutting down. About this time I looked down into the bottom of the boat and noticed that there was about three inches of water sloshing about. I yelled this back to Gerry and he yelled back that it was just spray.

It made sense but I kept looking down then noticed that each time we crashed down on a wave a thumb size spurt of water shot up. “It’s not spray,” I yelled “we’ve got a hole in the bottom!”

Gerry yelled back, “We’ve got to get to shore, but turning is going to be tricky.”

We puttered along for a few more minutes then when there appeared to be a reasonable distance between waves, he swung the engine to make as tight a turn as possible. Ordinarily it would have been a quick turn but the boat was getting sluggish and we only got about three quarters of the way around before the next wave hit. All the water at that moment probably became our friend as the weight kept us from flipping as the wave hit.

However seconds later that changed again. The wind was now almost dead behind us and the next wave lifted the stern forcing all the water to rush to the bow. The outboard screamed as the propeller cleared the surface! We plunged into the wave that had just rolled by and it somehow forced the bow up sending some of the water back. I jumped up and started chucking anything I could lay my hands on back to the stern. Gerry turned the tiller so we angled slightly and in a few moments were able to stabilize some of the sloshing. I tore into one of our boxes, found an aluminum pot and started bailing as hard as I could.

It was almost as far to shore as we had been out into the bay but we took a chance and opened the throttle a bit and were at the beach in about a half hour. Each minute of that half hour we were reminded of the hole by the spurts that continued to come, I never stopped bailing.

The beach was mixed sand and gravel so Gerry ran us in a little fast and was able to get almost a third of the boat out of the water.

We were both cold and wet and probably in some sort of shock, but we had made it and now we had to fix things.