To Killarney

Georgian Bay 3

Remember the 'challenging routes' mentioned in my last text, well today we did the toughest of them.

The first was just a warm up called “Narrow Island” then we came to Hangdog Reef and Hangdog Channel. It had many U turns & it was necessary to count the buoys as you went so you knew exactly where you were – there were a lot. It kept the navigator & the skipper on their toes. It was a narrow winding channel through huge round boulders usually only protruding between 1 to 3 feet out of the water (they looked like whale's backs). You were very aware that there was also a lot of the boulder under water. We made that and came to Alexander Passage where we read warnings about shoals, and in the event of low water or 2 foot running seas that there would be changes in depths and not as per charts and new buoys may have been added (but that's a good thing). We were lucky on all counts – we had calm days and height above datum was 25 inches. We never had any bad outside factors when doing any of these tricky runs.

We found an anchorage at Golden Sword Island -another quiet night. Our second to last tight squeeze was next morning in a place called Roger's Gut. It was 6 ft deep and had been blasted through rocks long ago - “the buoys are routinely moved to narrow the channel & to find the deepest passage” - quoted the book. That day we also took an alternate route called Dores Run which included a section known as Parting Channel. We read many warnings about this and I as the chart plotter (navigator) had to confer with the skippers and read out the relevant comments from my reference books such as – do not attempt this if draft is more than 5 ft (we were OK ) if this is your first time here, (it is – but they were confident )or if the boat is longer than 40 ft, (well -one is 38 & one is 42). if you have only a single engine,(we both do) do not attempt it. The author of the Water way guide “gave himself a nasty fright going through here in a 29ft boat” !! But they were up for it & are both competent . The problem is that you turn a blind corner into a very narrow channel which is made even worse by the large rock sitting in the middle of it. You do a tight right hander around the rock and between the red marker (denoting the cliff) then another dog leg left & then right between 2 green markers. The markers were barely wide enough to get the boats through. But do it slow & with accurate precision and it works. (see the photos to clarify my wordy description). Sue on the other boat didn't take breath until a while after when we were compelled to stop along side each other and get all the excitement out. The route up to this 'dogleg squeeze' and the pool at the end were crystal clear and exquisite.

We began the the last leg towards Killarney after this. It was a 24 mile stretch appropriately called Collin's Inlet. We anchored for the night after 7 miles at Mill Lake for another peaceful night.