[flyingwelshman]

Here are some answers to your questions/observations:

We arrived at Henry's at 10:30 in the morning because we were meeting friends
there for lunch. We got there early because a) I over-estimated the time it would take to get from Echo Bay to the restaurant, and b) this was to be the first time I had docked anywhere other than my home dock and didn't want to embarrass myself. As it turned out, the folks at Henry's were right there to help me land. By the time the restaurant opened there were a few more boats and a couple of planes at the dock.

The Bustards: I really wanted to include them in our trip as I had seen pictures and heard that they are beautiful. They are certainly picturesque. I would like to have spent more time poking around them in my dinghy. What little I did of that was pretty cool. But be warned: the water gets pretty shallow very quickly. I think a kayak or canoe would be the best vehicle from which to explore. One thing that surprised (and disappointed) me was the number of cottages on the islands. We moved from our first anchorage (between Green and Tie Islands) because a dog at the cottage that overlooks the anchorage began barking incessantly. We were really lucky going at the time of year that we did. It sounds (according to 'Ports') as though some of the anchorages get pretty packed. As you saw from the video, we had Bustard Harbour to ourselves. I don't think you'd see that mid-summer. The sail from the Bustards to Killarney was a highlight of the trip. The wind was just right and the view of the La Cloche mountains is spectacular.

Scott, no worries about 'hi-jacking', I know you have an affinity for the area. As to your technical questions: I used Adobe Photoshop to create the animated map. I 'borrowed' the map of Georgian Bay from the internet (I cleaned it up and modified it a bit). The track is made up of 336 separate red dots. Each time I added a dot I save the image as a new image file. Once I had all of the route I animated the map in Adobe Premiere Pro and saved it as an AVI file. I then thought that it looked a little flat so I went back and added a dropped shadow to each frame of the track. It was a real PITA. By converting the image to AVI I lost some quality, but I kind of like the 'old-school' look it has. I'm sure that there is a much easier way to do this, I just don't know what it is.

The cameras I used were a Sony Handycam (HDR-HC9). I really like this camera! It's a mini-DV cameras (so you don't lose as much quality due to compression) and has a great stabilizer, very smooth zoom control, and 6.1 megapixel stills on a memory stick. It is HD (1080) capable, but I don't have an HD burner on my computer. The downside to the camera is that I don't think it responds well to water.

For all the 'wet' shots I used the Sanyo Xacti VPC-WH1. We picked this up for the trip. It is waterproof to 3 meters (10 feet). It has a very durable housing. It is also HD. It only has 2.0 megapixel still resolution. It records video and stills onto a memory stick. The video format is MPEG-4, so I had to convert them for editing. The trouble is that, for some reason, when I converted the files the video came across but the audio didn't. I put the video together Sergio Leone style (without sound) and just saved the audio clips I wanted as wav's and dubbed them back onto the corresponding video clips. The up-side to this camera is that it has a really long battery life (about 3-hours) and, as I forgot to bring the charger for my other camera, this became the main camera that we used.

The shot of the wreck at Club Island was a happy accident. Sharon & I were exploring in the dinghy when we ran over the wreck (it's only a few feet under the surface). I told Sharon to just point the camera down in the water and I would try to drive the dinghy along the wreck. We got quite a bit of footage of sandy bottom, but also some pretty good footage of the wreck. If that hadn't worked I was going to snorkel over the wreck to get the footage. I did jump into the water to get the shot going up our anchor line. Man! I am lucky I put on my wetsuit! That water was freaking cold! Unfortunately it was only a 3 mm suit. The other option was my dry suit, but it was too much of a PITA to put that on for a 2 second shot.

Anyhow, sorry for going into so much detail - video editing is another hobby of mine.

Hopefully we can meet in Pentetang or out on the water. This weekend doesn't look that great weather-wise, but If we're going out I'll drop you a PM.

Dave