7/31/2019

This morning we departed the Hopewell Bay anchorage, moved through the remainder of the Shawanagan Inlet, and then went out into the open waters of Georgian Bay.  The winds were higher than we expected, and while the sea conditions didn’t bother us the wind was damned cold.  We are anchored tonight in the Bustard Islands.

The transit through Shawangan Inlet was uneventful.  The landscape was still dominated by large evergreen trees on rocky shores.  It was an attractive area with many cottages.

Along the way we passed through the hamlet of Pointe au Baril (pronounced by English speakers as ‘point-a-barrel’).  There is a larger town up a side channel but we didn’t go that way.  Photos of the major landmarks at the entrance are below.  Apparently this entrance off Georgian Bay was named for a whiskey barrel aboard a wrecked ship entering the harbor.  The barrel was found the following spring and hoisted on top of a rock adjacent to the channel.  A lantern was put there, and the first fisherman coming in was supposed to light the lantern to guide the following boats.  A lighthouse was built later which is pictured below.  Unfortunately there is no word of the demise of the whiskey.

After passing Pointe au Baril we went outside into the bigger water of Georgian Bay.  The sea conditions weren’t bad, but the wind was pretty cold.  We came back in to the small craft channel at Byng Inlet thinking we might stay at one of several anchorages in that area.  None seemed acceptable, so we pressed on.

After going outside into Georgian Bay again we are anchored tonight in the Bustard Islands, specifically in the East Gun Barrel anchorage.  This provides good protection from the prevailing northwest winds, and particularly for the west winds we experienced today.  We will assess the situation in the morning and decide where we will go next.

7/29/2019

We departed Parry Sound (the town) and moved through Parry Sound (the body of water) later this morning.  After following the small craft channel through a few narrow spots we anchored for the night in Hopewell Bay.  This is a sizable bay off Shawanagan Inlet with room for at least twenty boats.  There were three anchored tonight.

I attached a photo from our navigation system below that shows our path the last two days.  Most of our travel was inshore, and you can see that sometimes it was a winding path.

The trip through Parry Sound (the body of water) was uneventful.  This area could be rough with much wind, but it was calm this morning.  Much of the area is park of one sort or another, and it is an attractive place.

Along the way we passed through a spot called the Canoe Channel.  It is too narrow for most canoes, but that didn’t deter us with our 16 foot beam.  It was tight too be sure.

After stopping fairly early today we enjoyed a dinghy ride through the surrounding inlets.  The ride was fun, but the insect life wasn’t.  We invited the crews of the other boats anchored here tonight, Nectar and The Journey, to rocktails (cocktails on the rocks on shore) this evening.  I didn’t ask permission to show photos of those crew, but our resident pyromaniac was at work as you can see below.  It was a good time spent solving world problems, or at least cruiser problems.

7/29/2019

This morning we departed the Echo Bay anchorage and moved up the South Channel to the town of Parry Sound.  The winds were fairly strong today, and getting stronger as the day went on.  We are moored tonight in the municipal marina.

The trip up the South Channel was uneventful, but there were spots where it was fairly narrow.  There was plenty of water, but we had to twist and turn in places to stay between the rocks.  The photos below show some of the passage, though I find I am too distracted driving the boat to get photos of the narrowest spots.

We are tied up at the municipal marina in Parry Sound tonight.  This is a town of about 6,500 people with some dependence on tourism.  It is accessible by road, which is an exception in this area.

The wind came up very strongly tonight, followed by a rainstorm that cleared the air.  Much of the haze and humidity should be gone in the morning.

We left the anchorage on Twelve Mile Bay late this morning and moved only about 8 miles.  We are anchored/moored tonight in a secluded cove called Echo Harbor.  And we got to have lunch at a famous local restaurant, Henry’s, which is well known for fish and chips.

The cruise today continued on through the Thirty Thousand Islands.  It was a good weather day, especially after anchoring last night in thunderstorms.  The views here are spectacular with rock cliffs coming to the water’s edge.

We had lunch today at Henry’s on Frying Pan Island.  It is about two miles from tonight’s anchorage, and we had a good dinghy ride to get there after anchoring.  There is no land access to this island, so people come by boat and floatplane.  The food was very good, and we especially liked our Lake Huron shrimp appetizer.  There are, of course, no shrimp in Lake Huron, and the name is a joke, but the smelt were very tasty.

We are anchored tonight in a cove within Massasauga Provincial Park on Sans Souci Island.  Most people here moor as we did by setting the anchor and then backing up to the cove wall.  Then, with the dinghy, you take a line from the boat to a tree ashore, or to one of the many mountaineering pins people have driven into the rock.  The boat then doesn’t swing around the anchor, and more boats can fit in a smaller space.  Strangely enough, if you just anchor in the center of the cove there is no charge, but if you tie to the shore the park rangers collect $12CAD.  It’s worth $12 not to worry about swinging into another boat.  The photo doesn’t show it well, but our stern is about 40 feet from the rock shore.

We don’t have plans for tomorrow, and we’ll see what the weather is like in the morning.

I appreciate the comments I’ve seen on Facebook, and this is an attempt to address them.  I have pasted in screen shots from our navigation system that shows our track.  I will do this in several levels with the hope that others can follow along where we are.

The first image below shows an overview of the east half of the US and Canada.  Our track is in purple, and with the exception of a few days when I inadvertently deleted the track or forgot to turn on the tracker, this shows our path over the past several months.  We started the Loop in Jacksonville, FL, went up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway to Norfolk, then up the Chesapeake Bay and down Delaware Bay to Cape May, NJ.  At Cape May we went offshore to New York City.  Then up the Hudson River to the Erie and Oswego Canals, to Oswego, NY.  We then crossed Lake Ontario, went through the Trent Severn Canal, and are now in Midland, Ontario on Georgian Bay.

The second image below shows the last six weeks or so of travel.  It begins in central New York and continues on from there to Midland.

The final image below shows the cruising ground we are moving into, Georgian Bay.  This is a bay off of Lake Huron and it contains several National and Provincial Parks along with an area called the Thirty Thousand Islands.  We really expect this to be a fabulous area to move through and anchor in. We expect to be along the eastern and northeastern shore of the bay shown in the center of the image during most of our travels.  The larger body of water to the west (left side of the image) is Lake Huron, and the land along the left side of this image is Michigan.

We are still in Midland, but are leaving in the morning to begin the cruise through Georgian Bay.  We are told there is good cell phone coverage, so I think I can keep writing the blog over the coming weeks.

7/27/2019

We departed Midland and the fabulous marina there this morning and began moving up Georgian Bay.  We mostly followed the channels that make up the small craft route.  We intended to go further, but the weather was deteriorating and we elected to run into an anchorage off Twelve Mile Bay to avoid navigating during an impending thunderstorm.  It was a good decision.

The route we took is shown below.  After departing Midland we transited up the shipping channel to the west of Beausoleil Island.  This island is a national park, and we would have liked to anchor there, but it is close to the population centers and weekend warriors would have made this an undesirable decision.  We wound through the channels and islands, sometimes passing the channel markers with only a few feet either side of the boat.  Thankfully we had plenty of water on this route, so didn’t need to worry about shallow areas.  But the rocks we could see in the water outside the channel are a little unnerving.

This part of Canada is dominated by a geologic feature called the Canadian Shield.  It is a large Pre-Cambrian rock cap, mostly granite, that covers over half the country.  In this region pine trees and cottages seem to grow directly from the rock.  The images below show some of the sights we experienced today.  This area is known as the Thirty Thousand Island region, an appropriate moniker.

As we moved along we saw the weather was deteriorating.  Winds were approaching 20 knots, and while the sea conditions weren’t bad among the islands we weren’t comfortable with the situation.  We elected to turn into Twelve Mile Bay, an appropriate name for a 12 mile long fjord.  We knew of an anchorage just inside the entrance that suited us, and so we are there tonight.  There are ten or more boats in here with us.  Anchorage photos are attached below.  This anchorage is bordered by Provincial Park and Indian reservation (called Indian Reserve in Canada), and we will explore some in the dinghy tomorrow morning.  That is, assuming we don’t have thunderstorms again.

7/24/2019

Today we rode the carriage over the Big Chute, continued through the last lock on the Trent Severn Waterway, and moved into the town of Midland on Georgian Bay.  We had the boat hauled for what we expected was a propeller repair, but this turned out not to be necessary.

I described the Big Chute in a separate post, and today we rode it over the roadway and down the hill.  Photos from this transit are below.  The first photo is from the bow of our boat as the carriage rose out of the water and approached the road, the second as we were at the top of the hill starting the descent, the third and fourth show the front of the carriage as it entered the water at the bottom of the hill, and the last shows a view back as we exited the lock area.  This took about ten minutes total, with five minutes in moving the boat onto the carriage and getting the straps set correctly.  Then it was only about five minutes for the rest of the trip.  For me this was a highlight of the trip.

After the Big Chute we went through several narrow channels to the town of Port Severn.  Here we went through the last and smallest lock on the waterway.  The chamber was only about 80 feet long and 22 feet wide, so we nearly filled it (we are 51 feet long overall and 16 feet wide).

From Port Severn we emerged onto the southern end of Georgian Bay.  This is an inlet off Lake Huron (see separate post).  The water is 55 inches above normal datum right now, so we did not have trouble with shallow water there.  We took the Waubaushene Channel to the town of Midland where we were scheduled for maintenance work.

The marina in Midland is extremely well run.  We went straight into the lift well and had the boat hauled out.  The photos of this are shown below.  We expected to find prop damage, but after getting the boat out of the water everything was fine.  The props had no new damage (one already had a few nicks and scrapes that we knew about), but we found a big clump of weeds stuck on the port prop shaft.  The weeds can be seen on the ground behind the technician in the last photo.  After cleaning the bottom the marina put the boat back in the water and we moved to a transient slip for a couple days.

We expect to be away from marinas for the next several weeks, so we will use today to provision and fill the water tanks.

A friend who reads our blog commented they dislike using separate software to follow our position in our travels.  This post is an attempt to describe our current position and to give an idea of the area we are in.  Feedback, both positive and negative, would be helpful in making this easier for readers.

We are still in Canada and have entered a bay off Lake Huron.  The first map below shows four of the five Great Lakes, with Lake Huron in the center.

More specifically we have entered Georgian Bay, a large bay along the northeast side of Lake Huron.  We are in the town of Midland, at the far right of the photo below.  For at least the next couple weeks we will be cruising through Georgian Bay and anchoring in secluded natural harbors.  There are lots of them here.

The last photo is our track from yesterday.  We started at Big Chute, moved down through Port Severn, and then took the Waubaushene Channel to Midland.  The map quality here isn’t great, but it does show the route we took.

It is possible to follow us in near real time.  We have an AIS transponder that will show up on marine traffic monitoring websites such as http://www.vesselfinder.com or http://www.marinetraffic.com.  In both cases you can search for our boat name or use our MMSI number which is 368006170 (our international boat registration number).  We also use a tracking app called Nebo that is available for download for Apple and Android phones.  We use Nebo daily to see where our friends are in the area.

Again, please give an feedback if this information is useful or interesting.

This post is about the unique marine railway at Big Chute.  There are a large number of photos of this machine, and a detailed description of how it works.  I guess the engineer in me is coming out.  If this bores you please move on to the next post.  The description is about a boat going from the high side to the low side of the lock, but you can easily envision a boat moving in the opposite direction.

This is the Big Chute Marine Railway, also known as Lock 44 on the Trent Severn canal.  This is a railway system that loads boats onto a carriage on one side, lifts them out of the water and over a roadway, and deposits them into the water on the other side of the hill.  It is amazing to see.  The photos below give an overview of the lock, showing them loading three boats into the carriage on one side of the lock, and pulling the carriage out of the water with the boats on it.  As you can see, Sinbad was really interested in the process.

The next several sets of photos show the process in detail.  In this set of photos two small boats are loaded at the front of the carriage, and straps are used to keep them from tipping on their side or damaging the running gear.  A larger boat is loaded behind them, again supported by straps.  His running gear hangs off the back of the carriage as will be seen in later photos.  The carriage is then pulled partway out of the water and everything is checked by the lock tenders.

After the boats are loaded, and the carriage is pulled out of the water, it crosses a roadway.  The photo below shows the carriage with the boats on it crossing the road.

After crossing the road the carriage begins to descend a hill.  The overall altitude change is about 60 feet, but because the carriage rises up to cross the road it is a slightly higher hill than that.  The front and back wheels of the carriage ride on different tracks that keep the carriage approximately level throughout the trip.

At the bottom of the hill the carriage again enters the water, and the boats are floated again while still in the straps.  The photo below shows the same boat just floating before the straps are lowered on the sides.

After going down the hill the carriage didn’t have any boats to take back, so it went back up the hill empty.  These photos again show the separate tracks for the front and back wheels that enable the carriage to be more or less level throughout it’s transit.

Finally, I know you are wondering what powers this fabulous machine.  The answer is winches and steel cables.  Big winches.  The electric motors appear to be several hundred horsepower units, and the cable and reels are impressive.

We will ride the carriage over the hill in the morning, so I’m sure I will have more to write about it.

7/23/2019

This morning we went through the Couchiching lock and proceeded on through Swift Rapids, McDonald’s Cut, and are on a free park dock at Big Chute tonight.  It was a low stress day along the Severn River, and we were very much enjoying the shade of the bimini again.

This stretch of the Trent Severn is still in cottage country.  The stunning islands and beautiful homes seem endless.  We passed many spots where children were swimming and playing in the river within 20 feet or so of us.  The photos below show views of the area.  Along the way we went through McDonald’s cut, a manmade canal finished in 1905, cut through solid granite by hand.  This cut is shown in the third photo below.  It is amazing the amount of work this must have taken.

Along the way we also went through the Swift Rapids lock.  There was a little current there, but by no means were they challenging rapids.  The lock is a 47 foot lift (actually a drop for us), the largest single chamber lock on the Trent Severn.  The photos below show another boat in the lock chamber from above, the view from the stern and bow of our boat while in the chamber before the doors are closed, and the view from the stern after we are at the bottom of the lock.  It is an impressive machine, and is humbling how insignificant we really are.

Tonight we are at the free dock at the Big Chute lock.  This isn’t actually a lock, but is really a marine railway.  These were common when I was a boy near Seattle, but they are mostly replaced these days by travelifts.  I will write a separate post to describe this really neat railway.  The Big Chute rapids are shown below, and no, we aren’t going down them.