A Return to the U.S.A.

[Kyle]After Blind River, we had originally planned to spend a couple of nights in the Grant Islands. Our main problem with that plan was that a weather system was coming that was supposed to shift the winds to north, which was a bad direction, right at sunset on the second day. We planned to tough it out for the few hours until daylight.

The sail from Blind River was a slow one over a flat lake in light headwinds. That gave me plenty of time to think. The more of it I did, the less I liked the idea of the Grant Islands. The wind was currently light enough that the lake was flat no matter what the direction. I decided a better idea would be to find an anchorage along the north shore, so we changed the plan and found a spot in the middle of a big, shallow bay there (Supply Point, Huron Shores).

Still in Canada, and safely at anchor by Supply Point

The next morning, we awoke to gentle to moderate rolling. Rain was pelting the deck above our heads. When I finally climbed out of bed and went outside to have a better look, I emerged into a gray world of cold, sideways rain. Yuck! Looks like a nice day to curl up and watch a couple of movies.

A frontal system went through in the middle of the night. To take advantage of the brief wind shift behind it, we needed to be underway as soon as we could see our way out of the bay to make the 30nm+ to an official port of entry on the USA side. I put up the sails in the dark and then cranked up the anchor by hand, finishing right at the first of the day’s light. We got about halfway to the northwest corner of Drummond Island, across the border in the U.S. State of Michigan, before the wind shifted against us and we had to start tacking.

It wasn’t so bad. It was a nice day, the water was flat and the scenery on the north side of Dummond is nice. The wind shifted against us as we rounded the corner into Potagannissing Bay. The islets and shallows within required a bit of strategizing our tacking point so we wouldn’t end up in a blind corner.

We were on the Canadian side, squeezing as close to Milford Island as we dared, when the wind shifted to the complete opposite direction, right as we tacked. That had us heading for the same rocky shore as before. We quickly bore off and suddenly we were booming along on a fast broad reach. It was the fastest we had gone all day.

Approaching Harbor Point on Drumond Island (Michigan, USA)

As soon as we crossed the border back into the U.S., Maryanne checked us in on the Customs and Border Patrol app. A minute later, they sent a request for a video chat. She did most of the talking, only pointing the phone at me at the helm to show the officer that I was the same guy on my passport. Five minutes after that, he welcomed us to the USA and told us we could lower our Q flag. I had just hoisted it ten minutes earlier.

Change of plans. We had been intending to go to Drummond Island Yacht Haven, since it is an official clearance port. Instead, now we are officially cleared in, we turned right and headed for the protected anchorage at Harbor Island for a bigger dose of nature. The big lagoon in the middle of the island is shallow, which keeps most of the deep-draft boats on the outside and slows down the rest. Even though it was a beautiful Friday afternoon, we were one of only two boats inside when we anchored. The other was a fishing boat that left when the sun started to get low, leaving us surprisingly isolated on a weekend so close to town.

Blind River

[Kyle]Since we were the only boat in Cole Bay, I had the same idea for our departure that I had in Gore Bay, which was to do it without the involvement of either of our engines. It took me twenty minutes of pumping the manual handle back and forth to do what the electric windlass does in two, but there is a certain satisfaction in falling backwards half a boat length, watching the sails fill, and then silently accelerating forward. Using the engines is tremendously convenient, but it always feels a little bit like cheating to push a button to raise the heavy anchor, then ease the throttles forward to point the boat the direction I want it to go.

It took us a couple of tacks to get out of the bay, and then we were on our way to the Blind River, on Lake Huron's north shore. Fog had formed overnight and by the time we were more than a third of a mile from land, we couldn't see any sign of it anymore. It got thicker farther away. We had one AIS target, plus two others that we picked up on radar, pass ahead of us. I barely saw the stern of the closest one at 0.2nm before they receded back into it. I'm hoping our fog signal at least encouraged them to pop out and have a look around for us.

The wind shifted and then built until we were pointing at Blind River on a nice, fast beam reach. As we neared the small harbor, which only had a handful of boats, we noticed several helpful people gathering at the end dock to help us tie up. Just before we got to the end of the west breakwater, we waved, turned left and anchored in the really shallow water just out of the entrance channel. Sorry, folks, maybe next time.

In the morning, Maryanne wanted to paddle the kayak up Dorothy inlet, the second branch of the main river that surrounds the town to make it an island. We didn't get too far before a low bridge that is basically a couple of culverts blocked our progress. We thought about portaging the kayak across the road and continuing, but then Maryanne said she would rather just go for a long walk instead.

The kayak trip soon took us away from the old logging infrastructure and meeting the local wildlife

We were thinking we would just walk on the road for a while, but it turned out we were at the entrance to Boom Camp Trails. These were mostly set up as cross-country skiing routes in the winter, but they make for some nice walks this time of year. We crisscrossed as many of them as we could manage, taking in a couple of viewpoints, a rocky beach and a lot of tunnels of green woods. The signs at the entrance cautioned us to be careful about sneaking up on any Timberwolves or Black Bears, but we saw no hint of either.

Boom Camp trails were a pleasant find

We decided to spend the next day in town. Since Blind River has about three times the population as Little Current (4,000 vs 1,500), we were expecting a commensurate increase in diversions. Not so. Blind River turned out to be about as interesting as a back road truck stop on a Tuesday.

We started with the Timber Village Museum, which mostly told the story of the giant Mississagi fire of 1948 (Ontario's largest ever fire). The story is interesting, but the vast bulk of the exhibit consisted of videos which are probably available on YouTube to watch at home. The rest was about a garage-full of logging artifacts from the rush to salvage the remaining timber before insect infestations ruined it all.

We then wandered into the town center, which has a block full of nice-looking shops, but none seemed to cross our threshold of seeming worth patronizing. We eventually found a nice place, where we had a tasty lunch and a good cup of coffee. It was Tim Hortons. There's over five thousand of them in Canada.

Afterward, we meandered home while trying as hard as we could to turn anything that we could find along the way into an attraction.

"Oooh, look! These concrete sidewalk slabs are so uniform!"

"Hey, Maryanne! Check out this picnic table. Part of it is unpainted!"

It was a tidy town, but without too much to entertain - but they did have a Tim Hortons!

We did see some tidy houses with lovely gardens, but it was with a little sigh of relief that we climbed back in the dinghy for the row home. The view out the cabin windows is really very nice where we are anchored, so taking the afternoon off didn't seem like such a bad thing to do.

The Zhiibaahaasing First Nation

[Kyle]Since we were anchored with few other boats at Gore Bay and since there wasn't much wind, I got it in my head that we could lift the anchor manually and leave under sail. Of course, once it was in there, we had no choice.

It went pretty much as planned. The wind died to less than a knot as I was pulling up the anchor, so once I was done, we were just sitting there in the same spot, going nowhere under full sail. Actually, since there was not even a ripple on the water's surface to screw everything up, we were accelerating very, very slowly. This is one of the things I have always liked about Begonia. If you can feel any air moving at all and you put the sails up, with patience, she'll start moving.

Unfortunately, when she initially fell away from the wind, she ended up on the opposite tack from the one I had planned. We now had a little micro-drama. We were heading toward the end of the docks at the marina and only had about one-and-a-half times the room we needed to make the turn. Then the wind “gusted” all of the way up to 1.7 knots, which was great for our drive, but the temporary force on the mainsail caused a turning moment that overpowered that of our rudders, widening the turn.

With only seconds to spare (actually, about two thousand), I decided to tack and put the helm full to port. It took about five minutes to complete the turn, which gave me plenty of time to leave the helm and slowly walk the jib over to the other side. Now we had the same problem again with one of the anchored boats. There was a little bit more space, so I was sure we would clear them.

A couple aboard their boat didn't seem so sure. What they saw was a big catamaran about four boat lengths away, with sails up, pointing right at them. They stood in their cockpit, staring at us for several minutes, as I did my best to appear unconcerned, watching our electronic compass change by a degree every three seconds or so. Eventually, they were on our beam at a distance of one boat length and we were racing by at 0.4 knots. That's a Begonia length every 17 seconds. I bid them good morning, which broke their stares long enough for them to respond in kind, but they did not seem interested in fifteen more seconds of small talk, so we had a rather uncomfortable few minutes until we finally drifted out of earshot.

It took us almost two hours to make it to Janet Point Lighthouse (about a mile). There was no sense of motion, so mostly we kept track of our progress by studying the view and noting the subtle changes over time.

Then a little bit of wind did finally arrive, which was completely at the wrong speed and from the wrong direction. I'm beginning to think that the most important tool in the Great Lakes forecaster's kit is a pair of foreceps.

We had a bit of a race with a thirty-six-foot monohull that was also trying to get somewhere by sailing. We traded tacks a few times until the wind finally started to stabilize, then they headed north while we went west.

We made it well in time for sunset

Eventually, we had a reef in both the main and jib as we came booming around Cape Robert for the upwind leg into Cole Bay, where we dropped anchor as the only boat. Cole Bay is obviously on the charts, but none of our other sources of cruising info mentions anything in the immediate area. We were here partly because it offered good protection from the wind over the next two days, but mostly because Maryanne saw a note on the Manitoulin Island map from the tourist office that said it had a selection of "World's Largest" road side attractions, which I believe made it the most Australian place on the island.

The land around Cole Bay is owned by the Zhiibaahaasing First Nation. Zhiibaahaasing is pronounced something like She-Bash-ing. This small first nation community of seventy-five also has a penchant for big things. In their case, they have the world's largest dream catcher, the formerly world's largest peace pipe and a really big pow wow drum. Their traditional land is the even more isolated Cockburn Island, but this land on Manitoulin has been allocated to them so they can access reasonable schooling, medical and other services.

We were aboard puzzling over what the procedure might be for going ashore and enter the community when we were messaged by Kevin. He saw us anchored in the bay from his weekend getaway, did a little sleuthing, and eventually found reference to us on Little Current's U-Face page. Kevin is Deputy Chief of the Zhiibaahaasing (his mother is Chief. She was out of town). He generiously invited us ashore and offered to pick us up at the boat landing and show us around.

Zhiibaahaasing has a big peace pipe, dream catcher and pow wow drum; Kevin kindly gave us the grand tour!

Apart from the aforementioned big things, there isn't a whole lot to see in the that doesn't look like any other rural community. They work hard to maintain their cultural identity, and to finance a host of projects they have in the pipeline. Right now they are ramping preparations for their annual August pow wow. Kevin was so welcoming, and shared their history a bit, took us to the neighbouring community of Sheshegwaning for ice creams and then dropped us off at our request at the big drum so that we could meander home from there. We had a quick stroll along a pond-side path, where we met a lot of the local biting flies. From there, we re-joined the road. All the people we came across were really nice. The dogs were about fifty-fifty.

Even after strolling the shore for a bit before getting in the dinghy, we were still home four hours after setting off. That made for a nice low-key day. Thanks to Kevin for welcoming us and showing us around.

{Maryanne:For permission to visit Zhiibaahaasing there is a phone number you can call: (705) 283-3963. We attempted to call, but missed out as they only answer during working hours and only for a half day on Fridays. Thankfully Kevin reached out to us anyway so we were able to step ashore. Be aware though that some of the local dogs are very protective so it IS best to have a local with you as you walk around}

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