Little Current

[Kyle]Our next stop was the village of Little Current, the main town on Manitoulin Island, the largest freshwater island in the world. It is one of the few settlements in the Georgian Bay/North Channel area that is large enough to have good provisioning, fuel, boat stores, etc.

The route to little current passes by Strawberry Island Lighthouse, and the swing bridge across to Manitoulin Island

They also have a few restaurants, of which the main one is the Anchor Inn. In fact, if you eat at one of the others, there is a pretty good chance the food was actually prepared at the Anchor Inn and then brought over. It seems to be the de facto town center and is always busier than you would expect for a town of fifteen hundred people.

We bought fuel to replace what we had burned in the Detroit and St. Clair rivers and then tied up at the wall about a hundred steps from the Anchor Inn's door. We learned on the cruising radio net Facebook group that they host a Friday Happy Hour welcome for cruisers. We were in time to catch the last half of it.

The Anchor in and the Little Current YC (LCYC) make all visiting boaters very welcome

Roy, the net host, was there to hand out welcome packs and introduce us to the others. Most were regulars who have been spending the boating season here for decades. There were a couple of boats that were doing the Great Loop, this section being the portion between the Trent-Severn Canal and the big left turn at Lake Michigan. Almost everybody was from one of the towns in the Toronto Metro area, plus two Americans from North Carolina.

Then there was us. We always squirm a bit when people start asking where we are from because we know our answers are so unsatisfying. When Maryanne's, "I'm Engish, he's American, but we don't really have a base" answer didn't work, the guy next to me asked where we spent the last Winter.

"Uh, we haven't had a Winter for a while. I guess the last one was technically in Australia a year ago."

He ignored this. "Okay, where have you spent the most time?"

I thought for a second. "That would be Australia."

"I mean where have you spent the most time on the boat?"

"Australia."

"What about on this boat?"

"That is the boat I am talking about.

I could tell he was trying to suppress his building frustration. "Okay, but how did you get the boat here?"

"We sailed it. We left eleven months ago and sailed eighteen thousand miles to get here."

He seemed to think I meant we had it shipped that far for some reason, but once we told him the route we took, he got it.

Then someone in the back who had only heard snippets started spreading the word that we were from Australia. That quickly became: we were Australians on an Australian boat. This was aided by Maryanne's foreign accent and my uncanny resemblance to Paul Hogan.

We eventually straightened everybody out, but word spreads fast in a small town and for the rest of our stay, we regularly overheard people passing by Begonia telling each other that we were Australians or that the boat was from Australia, despite the American flag and hailing port and the Canadian courtesy flag. Some seemed genuinely confused when I emerged and said hi in a distinctly American accent. Maybe I should have gone with G'day.

Exploring the trails and other offerings of Little Current (including breweries, and ice cream, of course!)

For the rest of our time in Little Current, we did the usual boat jobs, followed by a long walk around the area, which suspiciously ended at a microbrewery.

Both mornings that we were there, we joined Roy in his office below the Anchor Inn to act as his live studio audience. He has an open invite to all the visiting boaters. Sometimes as many as a dozen will show up. On the first day, he asked us if we wouldn't mind being interviewed tomorrow on the air. Maryanne did most of the talking and did a good job of whittling down our twenty years at sea to a five-minute blurb. She managed to get in the tidbit that we started from Lake Erie many years before sailing to Australia and then turned it over to me to explain the specifics. Now a fairly good portion of the hundred or so boats listening within fifty miles of Little Current that morning know who we are. That could either be a good thing or a bad thing. Time will tell.

We were interviewed for the North Channel Cruisers net - photo credit to Betsy and Paul of Wonder Child