Wed Aug 2: Beausoleil Island to Indian Harbour anchorage

Rick here: As you know we’ve started our journey in the Georgian Bay and we will be following along the “small boat channel”.  This marked channel is a way to weave our way through islands and rocks along the northern edge of the Bay with minimal time exposed to the big open water of Lake Huron.  

Today we moved on to our second anchorage - Indian Harbour - and as we left, we realized the extent of the Georgian Bay part of our trip. In fact, we have roughed out our itinerary and we plan to be in Sault Ste. Marie by August 27 so that leaves us with 4 WHOLE weeks to work our way on up the channel.  I know, it’s a first world problem.

And the channel is very narrow in many places.  As we may have mentioned (Mel here-oh dear, he’s got the bit in his teeth-settle in for info!) this whole area is part of the Canadian Sheild - a huge area of granite that was scoured by glaciers during the last ice age. If you look at a map of the area you can see the long striations - long parallel fingers of rock that show how the glaciers scraped across this whole region.  Wonderful for a geologist, not so fun for boaters!  The rocks are unforgiving and will eat a propeller for lunch!  We are trying to be very attentive to our charts and the channel markers. 

You can see our blue dot on the map above at Beausoleil Island.  The destination- the red dot.  Below a view from our new guidebook.  The solid red line in the middle of the chart is the small boat channel. 

These smooth granite islands are everywhere.  In fact, the area is said to have 30,000 islands!  Many of them have small (or not so small) cottages (it’s used as a verb here-as in, ‘the area is heavily cottaged). We wonder about the logistical challenges of having a summer house only accessible by boat.  What if you need to run to the store?  What if you want to meet with friends for coffee? What do you do with your sewage?  What about electricity?!

Once we wove our way through the very narrow channel to Indian Harbour we found 4 other boats already there, but there was enough room for us to anchor.  After a short time we realized that we had already learned something in this anchorage.  Don’t buy a house (anchorage) on a cut-through street - always go for one on a cul-de-sac.  There are two different entrances/exits to this tiny bay and all afternoon (and evening) small boats roared through, waking the crap out of the handful of us huddled just off the channel.

The sun put on a show as it set.  We are already noticing cooler nights, even though it is barely August.  We’ve had a couple nights with temperatures in the low 50’s.  We’re starting to worry what it will be like in September!  Hope we bought enough long pants. (I apologize to those of you who still have 2 months of 90 degrees to go)

Our neighbors with their anchor lights lit up for the night.