We cruised down Whalesback Channel today to anchor at Sanford Island.
As those of you who have cruised the North Channel with us know, Whalesback Channel is a beautiful place, full of scenic islands, fine anchorages, and in the summer, lots of cruising boats. The water was so calm this morning that there were mirrorlike reflections of the islands in the water making these picture postcard scenes.
This is the view from the top of Sanford Island down to the anchorage and the beach, another picture postcard scene. I chose Sanford Island because it has a beach and it’s little visited by cruisers, owing to the fact that it does not have a completely protected anchorage. There is good protection only from Northwest through Southwest wind and waves, but since there is no forecast for strong wind or waves, it should do fine, and we’re the only boat anchored here today. That's Nonchalance out in the bay and Kathy on the beach.
The beach has very gradually sloping shores into the water so there’s only about a foot of water 50 yards out. We had to leave the dinghy (anchored by the motor) and walk to shore.
Of course, that also makes it nice for walking in the shallows. Kathy added one shell to her collection.
After we had explored the island and were back on the boat, a few thunderstorms passed by briefly, but were dramatic because of the unobstructed views. Only one actually rained on us much and by dinner time it was nice and sunny again.

We’re at Spanish, ON at the municipal marina.

We cruised 20 miles of the North Channel this morning through gorgeous stuff. All granite islands fringed with pine trees. It’s hard to get a picture of the expansive views here.

Then we stopped at Spanish. We’re a big boat in a little marina here. They said we’re the biggest boat they’ve had in here all year. Jim & Laurie and Beth & Paul will recognize this marina and John S. will too. We dropped picked up Jo n and dropped off the Jim & Beth here 2 years ago.

We’ll be anchoring out in the wilderness again tomorrow. I’ll set my alarm for 1:30 AM to see if we can see the Northern Lights. That’s the time for maximum potential tomorrow.

Yesterday we stopped at Little Current, ON to stock up on groceries for the North Channel. It’s a much larger town than Killarney so they have real grocery stores. However, all the restaurants in town close between 7:30 and 8:00 PM. We wandered into one at 7:30 and they said the kitchen just closed!

Today, we cruised into the North Channel and anchored in a bay at a wilderness island named South Benjamin Island.
On the way here, we saw this large black bear swimming from island to island. I hope we don’t run into one of these when we’re walking Daisy on the islands here.

South Benjamin Island is a beautiful North Channel type anchorage with excellent scenery, good anchor holding and protection from wind and waves. We’re sharing the anchorage with 6 other boats, but we don’t mind. It’s a beautiful Saturday and the North Channel is full of cruisers.

I caught two nice smallmouth bass by fishing from the aft deck of Nonchalance. I had been out fishing from the dinghy earlier and didn’t catch any. It’s so much nicer to fish from the big boat. You just cast out and sit there with a drink in your hand or stand on the deck and cast. We had these two for dinner and they were delicious!

We stayed in Killarney, ON today at the Sportsman's Inn marina.... at least it used to be a marina. Evidently, it was a hotel - restaurant - shops and marina and today only the boat dock is operating and only costs $35 per night to dock a 53 ft. boat there. The writeup in a cruising book made it sound very nice, but in fact.... it's a dump. They said the last owner lost it to the bank in April and somebody new just bought it at a bank auction this week.

The hotel was this 3 story building, looks nice from a distance... but the wood porches and railings are all rotted out. Now look at the docks: that's not a strange camera angle, the wood docks are wavy and you can feel them give and sag as you step on them. I'm glad they didn 't collapse while we were there. The water pressure for the boats is just a trickle, so we just used water from the tanks on Nonchalance. The electric hookup stopped working about 10 PM but I switched to another plug and it worked. Oh, well... you get what you pay for.

Killarney is an extremely small town. Very little in the way of groceries or things to see. However they do have a good fried fish stand that does a lot of business. The fish stand is a permanently parked converted school bus and their entire menu is fried fish and french fries, plus they have pop machines out front. They're busy at all times of day. This is one of their two fishing boats (about 40 ft.) that go out into Lake Huron to catch whitefish for the fried fish stand. We saw them out fishing while we were cruising here. They were filleting their catch as they came back in and had attracted hundreds of seagulls that were picking up the discarded fish parts. I watched them unload here, and they had about 4 bushels of large whitefish fillets. I'd guess that the two boats usually just catch enough to handle the needs of the fish stand. Sometimes they catch a few walleye along with the whitefish and they sell the walleye fillets for $15 per lb. in a small fresh fish store.

The Sportsman's Inn also had a lot of perrenial flowers planted around the hotel. These were quite striking, but I have never seen them. Maybe Beth knows what they are.. The individual flowers almost look like little hooded orchid blooms, but they bloom on a stalk like lupines.

We explored the Bustard Islands in the dinghy yesterday.

They’re solid pink granite islands scraped into parallel ridges by the last ice age. There is a very thin layer of soil where trees and vegetation gain a tentative foothold.

The islands are loaded with sweet wild blueberries. Yes, I’m sure they’re real blueberries because I looked up the leaves on the internet, the cruising books mention them and they taste exactly like blueberries.
Kathy made blueberry muffins for breakfast this morning. Really delicious. How’s that for a wilderness breakfast?

There are also lots of small wildflowers in bloom on the islands including these unknowns, many teeny columbines and dozens of other wildflowers I can’t identify but can appreciate.

I went fishing yesterday afternoon with no luck, but on the way back to Nonchalance I passed within 6 ft. a band of 4 minks playing in the water next to a very small island. They swim really well, like teeny otters, and they scampered into cracks in the rocks on the island when they saw me.

Today we cruised to Killarney by following the “small craft route” which is almost like following rivers through the maze of the 30,000 Islands area of the Georgian Bay.

It’s all the beautiful pink granite islands topped by pine trees and it goes and goes seemingly forever. There were 100 places where I would have liked to stop to fish.
We’re staying here at the Killarney marina for 2 nights.

We’re at the Bustard Islands out in the Georgian Bay. There is very weak and expensive internet here, so I’ll post pictures later. It’s a beautiful group of about 100 islands on the Northwest side of the Georgian bay.
We crossed the open waters of the Georgian Bay with almost no waves. About 4 hours of the trip was practically out of sight of land, like this picture.
We’re anchored inside one of the many deep and winding bays in the Dustard Islands group. It’s equally pretty to Kumfort Island, but there is nothing like the solitude we had last night. This view of Nonchalance doesn’t look crowded, but we’re off in a quiet bay.
The main anchorage about half of a mile away looks like this… there are 9 boats anchored there with 3 large trawlers rafted together.
And a closer look at the picture of Nonchalance above shows a second large anchorage with 5 more boats can be seen in the distance through a narrow channel.
However, there is more than a hundred times this much space in the island group, so when we dinghy around to go fishing we’re practically alone on the water or walking around the granite islands. There’s certainly room for this many boaters in the large island group. We all just cluster together here because the anchorages are completely protected harbors with no waves regardless of the winds.We’ll stay here tomorrow to fish and explore and then plan to go to the town of Killarny on Wednesday.

We’re anchored out at Kumfort Island in Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay.

It’s an extremely beautiful setting here. We’re the only boat anchored in this bay. The bay is so small that we’re anchored off the bow and tied to a tree off the stern to keep us from swinging into shallow water or the shore on the side the anchor is dug in. There are no cottages or civilization within view (but there are some camp type cottages on the other small islands nearby and some on the other side of this island). It’s a tight fit to get into this spot with a big boat, but 2 or 3 fishing boats zoomed through the bay on their way to better fishing grounds. The granite bedrock at the waterline of the islands is the Canadian Shield, which is the mantle of the earth, exposed here with nothing covering it after it was scraped bare in the last ice age. There’s very little soil here for the plants and trees to get a hold in. All of this makes for beautiful scenery because all of the thousands of islands here have this nice, smooth granite at their shorelines and most have trees on top.

We had a visitor as at the boat shortly after we got here….. a large snapping turtle.

The main shell was about 1 foot long and the rest of the head and tail added another foot. It was obviously looking for handouts…. just staring up at us from the water. He was undoubtedly expecting the dead minnows that fishermen throw out of their minnow buckets here. He ate one I had, plus some braunschweiger Kathy gave him. He had no interest in apple slices, worms or lettuce. He stuck around for about 30 minutes and then swam off only to reappear 3 more times, just hanging around the boat to see if we had any more.

I went fishing in the dinghy, with no luck, and I didn’t to fish from Nonchalance for fear of catching the snapping turtle. Kathy reminded me of my grandmother’s audio taped recipe for turtle soup, but I just did burgers on the grill instead.

Tomorrow we’re going up to the Bustard Islands. These islands are farther away from the population centers so we hope that there will be even fewer boats there.

We finished the Trent Severn Waterway today! We’re in Midland, ON at the start of the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron. Besides the pretty scenery with granite islands of the Canadian Shield dotting clear, blue waters, there were some exciting things today.

First, we went through the tallest lock in the TSW system. It drops 65 ft. from one section of rivers to the next. Kathy didn’t seem to get lockophobia in it though, probably because it was only 3 locks from the end.
Then, as we were motoring down a small lake, this float plane passed right by us 100 ft. up in the air, landed right in front of us, and then turned around and motored up past us.

This afternoon, we went through the “Big Chute” rail lift. It’s like a lock, except it uses a huge rail carriage to portage boats over a 55 ft. drop of granite down to the next river section.
This is really an engineering marvel. They float boats into the carriage, support them with lifting straps, and the whole thing climbs up over a granite mountain on rails. We went down, but these are boats that came up, loaded on the carriage and approaching the water.
Then, it goes down into the water and the boats just float off and drive out.
Big boats, like Nonchalance and this one that went down before us, take up the center of the carriage with a couple of smaller boats in front. Note that they set the boat down on it’s keel on the cart floor with the props hanging out over the back end so they don’t get squashed against the floor by the weight of the boat. When we went through, they also had to miss the stabilizer fins with the lifting straps.
Here is what it looked like from Nonchalance when we were loaded on the cart, and traveled up over a small hill and looked down the 55 ft. drop to where we were going. The carriage is designed so that it doesn’t tip the boats much as it goes up or down. Very impressive and totally fun. John S. would have liked to inspect the mechanical workings of the lifting train and Hepburn cart, which were in class A condition and had full redundancy.

Tomorrow, we’re going up to Parry Sound where we’ll anchor out in the wilds of Canada.

We stayed in Port Orillia today one more day to wait for strong winds to die down and Kathy was worried about water levels due to the 4 in. of rain here last night. On my brother, Jim’s, advice I had Poutine for dinner. Kathy had a little pizza. Yeah, here I go again… taking pictures of my food.
Poutine is a big mound of fresh cut French fries with cheese and beef gravy on them. Add beer and a fork and you’ve got dinner. Actually, it was quite good and, of course, filling. This is stick-to-your-ribs Canadian lumberjack food. I suspect that it also sticks to your arteries.
There is a really large, well appointed public park at the Orillia waterfront. Daisy enjoyed treeing the black Canadian squirrels every morning. They have a large statue of Champlaigne, whom landed here in 1615 and spread the Good Word amongst the natives.
The noble natives appear appropriately interested in his ministrations in the statue. I wonder if they were actually this appreciative in 1615.

We're in Port Orillia, ON at the end of Lake Simcoe, close to the end of the Trent Severn Waterway. We stayed on a lock wall at lock #39 last night after going through 8 more locks and about 30 miles of canal. Staying on lock walls is pleasant and usually rural, away from any traffic and tied up with 2 or 3 other boats. There's usually a little park with picnic tables, grass and trees. I fished the narrow canal channel and caught and released a small (14 inch) Northern Pike.

Most of the locks are hand operated by antique machinery, although in very good repair. This is one of the lock attendants opening a 25 ft. tall the lock door to let us out after the water had risen to the new level. After this lock, we reached the highest point on the Trent Severn Waterway and all the locks after this took us down instead of up.

The waterway goes through about 5 miles of channel that was dug through the forest floor, which is baserock, connecting the lakes and rivers to make a waterway. It's extremely narrow, almost too narrow to pass other large boats safely. You just have to go really slow and be really careful. There were stretches here where tree branches would brush the starboard side of the boat while we couldn't go any farther to port because of the narrow channel.

When you look down at the side of "The Narrows" channel, you see the rocks where they have dug a 6 ft. deep channel. It looks just like this for miles. In the places where the water gets wider, the channel doesn't so you have to keep in the channel carefully, even though the water surface looks wider. At one of these spots, we saw a boat hit the rocks by straying too far out of the channel when passing us. In addition, weeds covering the real bottom make depthfinders useless because they frequently show the water is 2 ft. deep. This is some scary stuff!

We went through the Kirkfield Liftlock, which is just like the Peterborough Liftlock, except at 50 ft., it's a little lower vertical height, and we were locking down instead of up this time. When you enter the lock, you just float right into the "pan" of water, so the view from the aft deck looks like this.

However, inside the lock, the view from the foredeck shows that you're hanging out over 5 stories in the air in a huge pan of water. Then they add more water to this pan and it weighs more than identical pan at the bottom and it drops slowly down as the lower pan rises on the other side of the tower. It's no place for anybody with acrophobia, but it is exciting.

Port Orillia is a large, typical tourist town with lots of ice cream stores, great baked goods, restaurants, shopping, and this prior city hall, now converted into a summer theater for plays. Everything is within easy walking distance from the marina, and the marina has free wireless internet. We're staying here 2 days to enjoy the town before we finish the Trent Severn and make it to Lake Huron.

We're in Buckhorn, ON, docked on a lock wall overnight. It's a nice tie-up with a park at the lock and dam, and a teeny town across the road. We went through 10 locks and 30 miles of the Trent Severn Waterway today, which puts us at mile 120... halfway to Lake Huron.

Some of the waterway was very narrow with rock edges and trees close in on both sides...

And some of the TSW goes through a maze of beautiful lakes with hundreds of pretty luttle islands. Some of the islands have summer homes on them.

The absolute height of the day, and, for me, one of the neatest parts of the TSW is the Peterborough Liftlock. Instead of bringing boats into a deep well lock and filling it with water to lift the boats, this lock has two absolutely huge metal pans, each bigger than any lock on the TSW, that are filled with water. The lock then lifts the pan full of water, including the boats in them, up 65 ft. to the river above. It lifts the lower pan simply by filling the higher pan with more water than the lower pan and as the high pan drops, the low pan rises. It was built over 100 years ago and is still in excellent operating condition.... an engineering masterpiece!

Here we are rising inside the lower pan with 3 other boats. The grey, curved steel with the railing on top is the superstructure for our pan. The higher pan has grey steel Xs and a railing on top, seen coming down. It's like a water powered elevator, and it runs much faster than I expected.

When you get to the top, they open the other end of the pan and you just float right out into the river! I enjoy going through the locks, but Kathy gets very anxious in the locks. I think it's a combination of claustrophobia and anxiety and frustration about handling a 60,000 lb boat with big ropes in the lock. She's the primary boat-roper (line handler) and she does a fine job, but she just gets wound up tight in the locks, so it's not as much fun for her when we go through 10 locks in a day.

So here's our progress.... that red line is really almost a loop!

We cruised up the Trent Severn to Peterborough, ON on 7/13 and stayed over one day in Peterborough to see the city and buy groceries, get a haircut, etc.

The Trent Severn was frequently narrow but winding through pine forests and sometimes opening up into lakes and wide rivers. The narrow spots have even more narrow channels where you have to be to keep from hitting rocks, but it's quite beautiful scenery here.

Peterborough is nice, because the marina is right downtown and you can walk to everything.

Peterborough is an actual city with 10 or 20 blocks like this of downtown stores.

We visited a local farmers market and bought sweetcorn plus some oyster mushrooms and black currants. The corn was just OK but the Oyster mushrooms were really good (Kathy sauteed them and served over pasta). I don't think Kathy knows what she's going to do with the black currants. Maybe a sauce to put over cheesecake or flan.

We'll be going through the Peterborough Liftlock tomorrow, which should be exciting. A number of boats have hit rocks going into the lock area. We'll be extra careful and hopefully luck will help too so we won't be stuck fixing bent props.