I love lying in bed in the moomincabin in the morning listening to the foghorns. It was foggy this morning, which I didn’t know until I got up and botes in the channel started blowing their horns.

I faaaared up Marine Traffic and WHOA! One of the boats coming south was the Wilfred Sykes! This was a family bote fave when I was a child, along with the Ryerson and the Cliffs Victory and I fergit what else. My dad and brother were the serious Boat Nerds in my childhood family.

The dilemma this morning was how to meet up with the Sykes to get a pic. The laundromat and a quick stop at Meijer were on my agenda and I was about to leave for those errands. The Up North Laundry is a block away from the locks. Would the bote paparazzi gods put me close enough to the Sykes to get a pic? I rolled the dice and left for the laundromat.

The adventure there *today* (it’s a boring one) is that when I schlepped my laundry in to My Corner (which is usually deserted except for the day Felon Voter and Betty Boop were there), there was a woman in a MASK doing something with laundry next to musheens 17 and 18, which I wanted to use. I was kicking myself for not bringing a mask up here (I had thought about it). I was hoping against hope that I could suppress any cough that might bubble up. I managed to throw my laundry in, pay for it (Dexter Pay app) and skedaddle to the bench outside without coughing. Hopefully I wasn’t close to her long enough to give her whatever I have. Phew. [Delete long thoughts here. Some other time. I do hope I didn’t make her sick…]

Whenever I leave the Up North Laundry, I head west on Portage (past the Soo Locks) to check if there are any botes. There was a bote in the locks but it wasn’t the Sykes. It was the bote coming down from Gitchee Gumee ahead of the Sykes. I held my breath a bit. I inched along Portage until the end. I went on into the West Pier. THERE WAS THE SYKES, BIG AS LIFE! I couldn’t believe my luck. I parked Cygnus on the grass. I got out of Cygnus and angled myself the best I could to get a pic of the Sykes. There were a lot of other bote paparazzi and seeing all of us, she blew a huge captain’s salute.

If I had been on my “game”, I might have schmoozed with the other paparazzi a little. I am learning to do that a *bit* nowadays, but I was focused on my next errand (Meijer) and didn’t think it through. Although I did schmooze with the Meijer uScan gal, just not about the Sykes. (I also hope I didn’t give *her* covid or whatever it was.)

But maybe I could’ve told another bote paparazzi about my story of watching the Sykes from the moominbeach since well before they were alive and maaaayybbbeeee they might have cared? Ya nevah know. But try harder, KW. You do have stories to tell. If people don’t care to hear them, that’s OKAY!

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