June 21-23, 2019 – We’d been looking forward to getting up to the Thousand Islands area with our boat ever since visiting Boldt Castle with Ben’s parents several years ago.
The area is quite stunning in terms of natural beauty, and in terms of the many camps, cottages, homes, mansions (and castles) on the mainland and islands. The water is amazingly clear, and in parts, very deep. However, anywhere near land, it’s all rock — no soft silty groundings here. While the charts are detailed, the high water alters the exact contours a bit, and what might have been an obvious rocky point in normal conditions might be a dangerous granite shoal just inches under the water now.
We linked up with our friends Davis and Caroline, who’d grown up amongst the islands as teenagers (oh, the stories!), and recently moved back to Clayton from Baltimore. On Sunday, an absolutely gorgeous day, they took us in their runabout all around their favorite haunts. We got a special closeup view of so many islands, bays and channels, that we lost track.
We zig-zagged across the US-Canadian border, at one point going through ‘the rift’ – a very narrow channel, where the invisible dotted line placed Chantale and me in the US, and Davis and Caroline in Canada, all while sitting in the same small boat. Hard to think about how to enforce border laws here when kids can throw a softball underhand between their respective sides.
While marveling at some fantastic camps, and some modest ones as well, it was kind of sad, at the same time, to see the impact of the high water on places with fixed docks or boathouses, or even their main buildings that weren’t on high ground.
We ended the weekend on the sundeck, enjoying homemade limoncello and a Saint Lawrence River sunset.
