North Channel: Killarney to Little Current

Friday, August 13, 2010

045-58.980 N
081-55.620 W

Ahoy from the Little Current, Ontario, eh!

Since I last wrote we've been exploring the anchorages between Killarney and Little Current. This area is full of beautiful places where you can drop your anchor. Some are named and other's aren't. Most people seem to pull into the named anchorages which are typically larger and provide significant protection, but you see lots of boats just anchored in other locations. It's been very calm lately, so we haven't needed protection from the wind and waves.

This is absolutely beautiful territory and most of it is untouched. If there are houses, they're typically small cabins tucked into the woods. The are hundreds of islands, some of which are tiny while others which are quite large. Much of area has towering white quartzite cliffs which provide stark contrast to the green pines which cover them.

There are a tremendous number of boats which move between the anchorages on a daily basis and you can get a feel for the number of boats based upon a cruiser's network which is held via the VHF channel 71 every morning at 9 AM. After a weather report and news summary, boats from the surrounding area check in with their location and destination. We actually got a very nice welcome by the controller who had read our web site.

Our first stop was Covered Portage, which was just a few miles from Killarney. It's a beautiful anchorage with inner and outer bays. The inner bay is completely surrounded by tall cliffs which would provide great protection in a storm, but since the winds were very light, we decided to stay in the outer bay to get any breeze that we could. We hiked up the cliffs to get a view of the anchorage and along the trail we found evidence of bears, which isn't surprising because earlier in the year the hills are covered with blueberries. Both bays are very popular and by the end of the day there were 12 boats in the inner bay and 18 boats in the outer bay.

We left Covered Portage and headed to Baie Fine (pronounced Bay Fin), which is about 22 miles by water but only 4 miles as the crow flies. Baie Fine closely resembles a fjord as it's an 8 mile long narrow body of water surrounded by cliffs, some of which rise to over 400'. Just to the north you'll see the Cloche mountain range with peaks at 1200'. Our first stop was at Mary Ann's cove, which is a small cove located a couple of miles into Baie Fine. It was here that we got our first experience with Med-mooring, which is where you drop an anchor and back up to shore and then tie the stern of your boat to something on shore. We've med-moored using mooring balls and tying to a dock, but not with an anchor. This is done to fit more boats into an anchorage, and we executed the maneuver just fine, but I wouldn't want to try it in high winds.

The next morning we headed further into Baie Fine and anchored at the east end of it. There's a channel that goes a couple of more miles to "The Pool", but reports were that it was rather shallow and weedy, so we stayed where we hoped to get some breezes and took the dinghy up the channel. At the far end of the channel there's a trail head that takes you to some of the lakes in the area. We decided to go to Topaz lake and after a 20 minute hike up a fairly steep rock strewn path, we were presented with a beautiful little lake nestled between white cliffs. Believe me, the water felt wonderful after the hot walk up there!

The anchorage at the end of Baie Fine was wonderful as there was no one else around. The only sign of other human life was the anchor light from a boat a couple of miles away. After a great dinner and another dip in the 74 degree water, we sat in the cockpit watching the light slip from the sky and listening to loons call to one another. The occasional howl of some large animal made us both glad that we were in a boat and not camping.

The following day we headed to Heywood Island, which is completely different from Baie Fine as it's a relatively flat island. It has a large bay where you can fit a lot of boats as well as a 0.7 mile channel that's very also very popular to anchor in. We finally had nice breezes and Sue took the opportunity to run the oven and make a blueberry coffee cake (which we shared with boats in the anchorage) and then we had pizza night. Yum!!! Later that night I awoke to find that the skies had cleared and I got up to watch the Perseid meteor shower under pitch black skies. I was rewarded with about 1 meteor per minute! That was nice.

Today we're headed into Little Current to pick up some fresh provisions and hopefully some hose so that I can finally replace all of the radiator hose that's leaking. Right now it's a very slow leak, but it's still a leak that I have to monitor daily. There's also a cruiser's net get-together at 3:00 that we'll attend. It's always nice to put a face to voice/boat-name.

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For the cruiser:

Covered Portage: We anchored outside in mud in 17' and in the inner cove we found 12' in the center with 7' close to the shore. Unless you've got a wind out of the E which is making the outer bay bumpy, I'd prefer the outer bay for the breeze.

Mary Ann's Cove: The charts show 5', but we didn't see less than 22' where we dropped the anchor in mud. We pulled back within 20' of shore and still had 13'.

East end of Baie Fine: The charts are correct and we anchored in 17 of clay that didn't want to come off of the anchor. There were also lots of weeds that came up with the clay. There's lots of places to anchor in the channel to the pool and it looks like there's more than 5' getting into the pool. I was quite happy where we were as it's a fast dinghy ride through the channel.

Heywood: We anchored in the large bay in 17' of mud. There's a little bay off of the main one that has plenty of water on the S side. There's also plenty of water in the long channel and you can find some locations to give you great sunrises.

Log ID: 1378