Gore Bay

[Kyle]The wind for our leg to Gore Bay, on Manitoulin Island (still on Lake Huron), was forecast to be a nice beam reach in lightish winds. That was the good news. The bad news was that they were supposed to run out and change to headwinds by eight a.m., which meant we were going to have to leave EARLY.

An early start has some benefits

The sail worked out pretty much as planned. The only hitch was that, since it had really been blowing hard through the night, there was a sloppy, left-over swell slowing us down. The wind shift actually didn’t happen until nine o’clock, which worked out pretty well since we had been a bit on the slow side. We were able to delay starting the engines until we needed the electricity from the alternator to run the anchor windlass. Most of the boats at Gore Bay (Population 867 in 2016) were at the marina, but there were two others anchored out. We joined them.

When we rowed ashore, we talked to the marina. They told us we were welcome to tie our dinghy to any open space for free and to have a nice day. Well, thank you very much!

I like Gore Bay. It’s a tidy little lakefront town with a handful of diversions, but not so many that we felt like we had to beat ourselves up to see them all. The first day, we took a walk out of town about two miles to Janet Point Lighthouse. There, we surprised a teenaged attendant who let us into the combined lighthouse and keeper’s cottage while apologizing that it hadn’t really been cleaned up for the season just yet. Maryanne and I poked around the living quarters downstairs while she resumed scrubbing the upstairs.

The thing I found most interesting was that in the winter, the lighthouse serves as a waystation on the trail to the mainland. In the summer, Manitoulin is an island accessible only by crossing the swing bridge at Little Current. In the winter, it’s more of a clump of trees in a vast ice field which can be accessed by any number of roads and snowmobile routes, each marked with stakes. It seems so green and placid now, but when we started looking for them, we saw signs everywhere that this whole area is covered in thick snow and ice through the winter. It was a reminder to not be too impulsive when buying that perfect little cabin by the lake…

Stone men figures are a tradition cairns (inuksuk) of the Arctic peoples - they've been adopted locally and with some whimsy we noticed these sunbathing inuksuk

We refueled from our walk with a meal and a flight at Split Rail Brewery because we’re tourists and this sort of thing is really just a box held up by a stick tied to a string that leads into the woods specifically to catch people like us. It worked. We had a nice time. The beer tasted like beer.

The Split Rail Brewery is a local buisiness

Having had enough for one day, we returned the next morning for an easy hike of about the same distance in the other direction. We started with the two museums in town. Both were not great. The Marine Museum was mostly scale models of ships engaged in the fresh water trade. Some had technical info, like gross tonnage, but few had any context of what each ship was doing out there. Even the little alcove about the Edmund Fitzgerald only had the footnote at the end: “Lost with all hands aboard.”

The Gore Bay Museum was an enhanced version of the same theme. There was lots and lots of stuff there, but almost nothing in the way of descriptions or explanations. It felt like being in a hoarder’s garage. That could have been fun, but all the signs saying, “Do Not Touch” kept us from picking up each artifact and passing it back and forth trying to figure out what the hell it was used for.

Around town, and the wildlife found along the various trails (which are mostly cross country skiing, or even snowmobile trails in the winter months)

The hike was nice enough. It ended up at a high viewpoint on the bluff opposite the town itself. By the time we had returned, we didn’t exactly need it, but we stopped by for a late lunch/early dinner at Purvis Fish and Chips. We had an outdoor table on the balcony overlooking Begonia and the food was both excellent and enough to alleviate any need to make a meal at home later.

With that done, plus a quick stop at the grocery and hardware store, we had completed our tour of Gore Bay. Like I said, it’s nice, but staying any longer would just be watching reruns, so we decided to move on earlier than the spirit of our Lazy Summer would strictly dictate.

View from the ridge trail