During my first two attempts to cross Lake Ontario, I'd felt something was wrong. Hannes Lindemann had a similar feeling when he first attempted his kayak crossing of the Atlantic in a folding kayak thirty-nine years earlier. The feeling led me to abort both tries after paddling ten and fifteen miles into the lake. On the third day, I sat on a beach and listened to a weather report that gave me no hope of having any more usable weather to cross with. One and a half weeks later, on September 5, I returned to Irondequoit, New York, a bit tired from the twenty-hour drive from Minneapolis. I launched that night onto cloudy water that made me think of the past pollution problems of Lake Ontario. I was very focused and determined to finish this crossing. One hour later I noticed my sea anchor was not connected to my bow. I took care of the problem not by paddling back to shore, which would have consumed two more hours, but by jumping into the lake and connecting it by hand. When I reentered the kayak, I fell once again into my old procedure of hour-long paddling intervals interrupted by five minute breaks. I reached the lake's center as the sun started to rise between the lake and the low-lying clouds. Surrounding me were one-and-a-half-foot waves with two-foot waves passing through occasionally. I input the waypoint location into my GPS then headed off toward the Ontario coast, knowing the waves could eventually wear me down. Normally, waves of this size would not bother me, but I had thirty more miles to cover. At 2:30 p.m., seventeen and a half hours and sixty miles after leaving New York, I entered the Cobourg, Ontario, harbor surfing on three-foot following seas. Once I'd settled in on shore, I arranged an interview with the local press, set my tent up at a shoreline campground, ate a large amount of food, and slept. Later that night I awoke, ate a lot more food and slept till noon of the next day.

Upon waking, I listened to the Canadian weather forecast and found I had a weather window with waves of less than one meter for the next eighteen hours. That news motivated me to cross back to New York. Twenty-four hours after landing on the Canadian shore, I was off once again. Ten miles into the return trip, I started to feel pain in my heels despite the large amount of padding under them. The pain would be my constant companion, but it did not detract from the enjoyment of the crossing or the beauty of that evening's sunset. Fifteen hours after I started, I reached Irondequoit, cutting an hour and a half off my crossing time just two days earlier.