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.