Little Shelter Bay

[Kyle]Our leg after Pike Bay was a slow, easy downwind sail to Little Shelter Bay, tucked in behind Shelter Island, at almost the southeast corner of Drummond Island. From our anchorage, we could clearly see Cockburn Island, at the very edge of Ontario about as far from the US/Canadian border (two miles) as we were on our side in Michigan.

Little Shelter Bay is actually quite big. As practically the farthest place on Drummond Island from both the main settlement and the ferry crossing at Detour village, the roads fork and reach their ends in the adjacent bays. For some reason, Little Shelter Bay so far remains undeveloped.

Because of this, we were hoping to find it teeming with wildlife. We launched the kayak and paddled all over the area, but the most interesting thing we could find (apart from a lot of nice scenery) was a single Bald Eagle in the distance two bays to the west. On our second morning there, I was in the cockpit when I heard a strange grumbling noise. Since the bay was flat calm then, I was easily able to pick out three chattering little mammals swimming about halfway between Begonia and Shelter Island. At their closest approach, when I got my best look, they seemed to be River Otters, but they could just as well have been a weasel called Fishers, or possibly Mink, which also live in the area. We searched and searched for them on our next big kayak outing and never even found any hint of them.

We saw some wildlife.. We think the first pic is a river otter. We saw white-tailed deer, the bird bathing is a Song Sparrow and the duck is a Common Merganser

It turned out the most elusive fauna we found was the hermit that lives on Shelter Island in a small house almost completely hidden by trees. We never landed on the island, but we did paddle around it in the kayak, which is where we got our look at one of the top corners of the house’s solar panels. There are also several small docks in various levels of dereliction, as well as two small boats that were wrapped in shrink wrap and appeared to be in good condition. One evening, we heard what sounded like a boat being winched out of the water and on two occasions, from Begonia’s location three-quarters of a mile away, I caught two half-second glances of the back half of a human disappearing into the trees. That is enough evidence to conclude definitively that it was Bigfoot.

The sun shone and the scenery was quite wonderful

Kyle on Begonia, and feasting ashore on raspberries