When is a sailboat not a sailboat?

Forecast:

Sunday, winds less than 10 knots from the south west.

Monday, winds less than 10 knots from the west, shifting to the south west.

Tuesday, winds less than 10 knots, direction variable.

Wednesday, winds less than 10 knots, west shifting to south west.

Thursday, winds less than 10 knots for the rest of your life.

That fact that we are headed north east means that our speed is subtracted from the wind that we feel from the south west. So at the 7 knots motoring speed that 'Anomaly' makes, "less than 10 knots" means that we (and the sails) feel less than 3 knots. Of course the 10 knots has rarely actually materialized, generally we are getting around 3 - 5, so the wind that we feel is actually from the north east - the direction we are heading. 

We were able to sail part of the day from Kingston to the Thousand Islands, the rest of the time has been motoring, or motor sailing (the latter being generally unbridled optimism). By the Thousand Islands we had put 40 hours on the engine to travel 269 miles, burning $4/gal Canadian diesel at 1.02 gal/hour. This diesel is well travelled, we purchased it in Windsor on the Detroit River last fall returning from Lake Huron. We used very little of it then ("winds 25-30 knots from the south, increasing to 30-40..") and it wintered over with the boat in Mississauga. 

We were finally able to sail from a couple hours out of Montreal to Trois Rivieres, and we sailed much of the next day to Quebec. Both days with help from the current, up to 5.7 knots help at the Richelieu rapids. The instrument system compares Speed Over Ground ("SOG", derived from GPS) with Boat Speed (cynically abbreviated "BS", derived from an ultrasonic sensor measuring speed through the water) and reports the difference as "Drift" in sailor parlance, or commonly "current".  The only time 'Anomaly' has gone faster was on the truck.

A modest hotel on the approach to Old Quebec City: